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LITERARY LIVES. 


EDITED BY 


W. ROBERTSON NICOLL 


NEWMAN 


LITERARY LIVES 
Edited by W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D. 


MATTHEW ARNOLD. By G. W. E. Russell. 
CARDINAL NEWMAN. By William Barry, D.D. 
JOHN BUNYAN. By W. Hale White. 
COVENTRY PATMORE. By Edmund Gosse. 
ERNEST RENAN. By William Barry, D.D. 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE. By Clement K. Shorter. 
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Andrew Lang. 


IN PREPARATION 


R. H. HUTTON. By W. Robertson Nicoll. 
GOETHE. By Edward Dowden. 
HAZLITT. By Louise Imogen Guiney. 


Each Volume, Illustrated, $1.00 net. Postage 10 cts. 


Cardinal Newman 
From a Photograph by Barraud 


3SIX? 


Literary Lives 


NEWMAN 


BY 


WILLIAM BARRY 


(v 


ILLUSTRATED 


NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
1907 


TROW DI 
PRINTING AND BOO 


*¢ Cor ad Cor loquitur’” 
Motto on Cardinal Newman’s Shield. 


‘©Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem’’ 


His Epitaph, written by Himself. 


af 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I 


PAGE 


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CHAPTER II 


PREsES IE RACBABEANS) 1) file (di aah bal hie) Goo, 1 QE 


CHAPTER III 


Rinse CaTHoric Perio) 5 sie be) es 6) 8, 66 


CHAPTER IV 


WeOLOGIA. PRG VITA SUA. (36 ek es OS 


CHAPTER V 


RpIED LOGE) ORY BELIEF 2) i) ee \ be) Vas BZ 


CHAPTER VI 


Py REANE Ge) GERONTIUS) 0.00) eae oe), BGG 


Viil CONTENTS 


CHAPTER VII 


Tue Man or LETTERS 


CHAPTER VIII 


Newman’s Piace 1n Hisrory 


PAGE 


- 186 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


Cardinal Newman. . . . . . . . Frontispiece 


FACING 
PAGE 


Oriel College and St. Mary’s, Oxford . 14 
The Cottages at Littlemore which Newman turned 

into a House of Studies 28 
Cardinal Newman, 1844 . Sauer Shite) AD 
Cardinal Newman, from the Miniature by Sir W. 

C. Ross . x 56 
The Oratory, meee. Bisathctans : 70 
Siumdinal Newman; E8Gb . 250. 8% 84 
Cardinal Newman, 1861 : 98 
Cardinal Newman, from a one eS Lat Cole- 

ridge . : Sete \ BED 
Cardinal Newman, from an Hai . 126 
Cardinal Newman, from the ae i Sir John 

E. Millais eta ho: LAG 
Cardinal Newman, from a Picea : a ESA 
Cardinal Newman, from the sin - Miss 

Emmeline Deane . : . 168 
Cardinal Newman, from a Photog Be Father 

Anthony Pollen aes Sip at beat Ves. Hee 


x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


FACING 
PAGE 


Cardinal Newman about 1889 . . . . « « 196 
Cardinal Newman’s Grave at Rednal . . . . 210 


The Statue of Cardinal Newman at the Bromp- 
ton Oratory. . 9. 2°. 6 5) 


NEWMAN 


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CHAPTER I 


EARLY YEARS 


TuHarT in the middle of the eighteenth century 
a deep intellectual torpor had fallen on the great 
English seats of learning is well known and has 
been set on record by Gibbon and Adam Smith. 
“In the University of Oxford,” observes the 
Scotch economist, “‘ the greater part of the public 
professors have for these many years given up al- 
together even the pretence of teaching.’ Gibbon, 
who was entered at Magdalen in 1752, is yet more 
copious and emphatic. ‘‘ The Fellows, or monks 
of my time,” he says, “‘ were decent easy men, who 
supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder; their days 
were filled by a series of uniform employments, the 
chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the com- 
mon-room, till they retired, weary and well satis- 
fied, to a long slumber. From the toil of reading, 
or thinking, or writing, they had absolved their con- 
science; and the first-fruits of learning and ingenuity 
withered on the ground . . . Their conversation 
stagnated in a round of college business, Tory poli- 
tics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal; their 

I 


2 NEWMAN 


dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemper- 
ance of youth; and their constitutional toasts were 
not expressive of the most lively loyalty for the 
House of Hanover.” 

From this ‘‘ vulgar mediocrity,” as Mark Pat- 
tison terms it, Oxford was awakened to higher 
thoughts, although not at once, by the French Revo- 
lution. A new era begins in 1802, when Eveleigh, 
Provost of Oriel, a Devonshire man, brought in 
amid strong opposition the reformed scheme of ex- 
amination for degrees. At first voluntary, the test 
was extended in 1807 to all candidates for the Bach- 
elorship of Arts—New College alone excepted. 
But Provost Eveleigh had taken a decisive step 
when, at Oriel, he made literary acquirements the 
condition of enjoying academical privileges. The 
Fellows were now selected on that ancient founda- 
tion not as clubable men, who would sit long over 
their port, but as men of mind, or, in the vague dis- 
paraging phrase of unreformed Oxford, as ‘‘ No- 
etics.” This appellation was changed, by-and-by, 
into the more modern, though hardly more definite, 
one of “ Liberals.”” Chosen, not for their congenial 
habits, but in the hope that they would prove orig- 
inal thinkers and independent inquirers, these men 
‘‘ represented a new idea, which was but gradually 
learning to recognize itself, to ascertain its char- 
acteristics and external relations, and to exert an 


EARLY YEARS 3 


influence upon the University.”” They knew little 
of the past, and nothing at all of Rousseau, Kant, 
or Goethe. Yet they belonged to the movement of 
Rationalism; for ‘‘ they called everything in ques- 
tion; they appealed to first principles, and disal- 
lowed authority as a judge in matters intellectual.” 
Any German critic would without hesitation have 
assigned to them a place in the Aufklarung, or sect 
of enlightenment which, dating back to Locke, Vol- 
taire and Hume, had resolved the social, nay the 
metaphysical order, into atomic forces, and substi- 
tuting the reason of the individual for public tradi- 
tion, free contract for Divine Right, self-conscious- 
ness for religious meditation, was bound to enter 
upon a conflict with Church and State in England, 
as it had already overthrown the European system 
abroad. 

Such, in tendency, was the school of ‘‘ Noetics,” 
to which Copleston, Whately, Arnold, and Hamp- 
den have given a position in the history of Oxford. 
Its home, as these names bear witness, was Oriel, 
the college of Ralegh and Bishop Butler; its im- 
- mediate source we cannot fail to perceive in the 
French Revolution; yet its pedigree may be traced 
to English soil, to the Whigs who brought over 
William of Orange, and to John Locke, who would 
have banished mysteries from the Christian creed, 
explained ideas by mechanical association, and es- 


4 NEWMAN 


tablished society on a balance of interests. The 
logic of all this we may fairly term Baconian, for 
it reduced first principles to a shorthand summing 
up of experience, and thus ended in utilitarian re- 
forms. 

That many of these were steps towards a better 
order of things will not be questioned. But that 
Oxford, which had been in its day Laudian and 
Jacobite, which prided itself on its loyalty to the 
Church of England, nay, which was medieval yet 
in the spirit of its institutions no less than in the 
style of its architecture—that this “ queen of ro- 
mance’ and “‘ home of lost causes’ would give in 
without a struggle to the philosophy it had always 
detested, who could imagine? It has been well ob- 
served that “ Oxford carries with it, more than 
Cambridge, the feeling of a great past, and that it 
is haunted by the ghost of the Middle Ages.” The 
eighteenth century itself had called up champions, 
so unlike yet so recognizably sons of the ancient 
Oxford, as Wesley, Butler, and Johnson, to de- 
fend religion against the deist, the Epicurean, the 
Sadducee. In a large sense, the Catholic reaction 
which took shape with Andrewes, Bishop of Win- 
chester, in James I’s time, had never died away. It 
remained as unreasoning bigotry, as hatred of in- 
novation; when the Stuarts went down, it clung to 
“good old” George III; it idolized Burke, who 


EARLY YEARS 5 


smote with lightnings a ‘‘ regicide peace ’’; it was, 
said Pattison afterwards, still “‘ debating its eternal 
Church question as under Henry IV.” But it was 
an instinct devoid of mind, without principle or 
power of development; and however thorough- 
going, all it could do was blindly to resist every new 
thing, to consecrate long-standing abuses, and 
thereby to call down fresh blows from the reform- 
ers, who despised with no small show of reason its 
incorporated and hitherto invincible selfishness. 

At a moment when the ‘‘ March of Mind” was 
in full swing; when Parliament had broken with the 
old English Constitution and entered on the path 
which leads to universal suffrage; when Premiers 
undertook to suppress bishoprics, and popular feel- 
ing was strong against the Established clergy, there 
appeared in Oriel, the centre of enlightenment, a 
figure which, at all times rare, was then almost un- 
known to Oxford and England, that of a religious 
genius, John Henry Newman. Destined, like Wes- 
ley, to traverse the century; like him to exercise on 
all who came near a miraculous influence of attrac- 
tion or repulsion; like him also to be rejected of his 
University and his Church, to set a large movement 
going in many directions, and to live down hatred, 
suspicion and contempt, so that he did not die until 
the nation had learned to be proud of him, in one 
thing Newman far surpassed Wesley; he was a man 


6 NEWMAN 


of letters equal to the greatest writers of prose that 
his native country had brought forth. The Cath- 
olic Reaction of the nineteenth century, more for- 
tunate than the Evangelical of a hundred years be- 
fore, claims its place in literature, thanks to this 
incomparable talent, side by side with the German 
mysticism of Carlyle, the devout liberalism of Ten- 
nyson, the lyric Utopias of Shelley, and the robust 
optimism of Browning. Newman is an English 
classic. From this point of view we propose to deal 
with him in the following pages. 

All great literature is autobiography. However 
impersonal its form, Hamlet soliloquizes on its high 
stage, regardless yet not unconscious of the audience 
whose thoughts he brings to a point of light, ex- 
presses, and for ever stereotypes in his own fashion. 
Between the age and the man there is a secret cor- 
respondence. It was written that Oxford should 
play its part in the drama of the century, but where 
could it discover a protagonist who might be at 
once the chief actor during these tumultuous scenes 
and the meditative choragus, skilled enough to un- 
fold in subtle trains of thought and winning 
melody the motives by which it was inspired? A 
singular concurrence of events, not yet fully un- 
ravelled, fitted for the task this clerical Fellow of 
Oriel, who was not by origin either Catholic or 
English. 


EARLY. YEARS 7 


Born in the City of London, not far from the 
Bank, on February 21, 1801, John Henry was the 
son of John Newman and Jemima Fourdrinier his 
wife, the eldest of six children, three boys and three 
girls. ‘‘ His father,” says Thomas Mozley, “‘ was 
of a family of small landed proprietors in Cam- 
bridgeshire, and had an hereditary taste for music, 
of which he had a practical and scientific knowledge, 
together with much general culture.” He was chief 
clerk and afterwards partner in a banking firm, was 
also a Freemason, with a high standing in the craft, 
an admirer of Franklin and an enthusiastic reader 
of Shakespeare. These particulars, except the last, 
will prepare us for the fact that in an earlier genera- 
tion the family had spelt its signature ‘‘ New- 
mann’; that it was understood to be of Dutch 
origin; and that its real descent was Hebrew. The 
talent for music, calculation, and business, the un- 
tiring energy, legal acumen, and dislike of specu- 
lative metaphysics, which were conspicuous in John 
Henry, bear out this interesting genealogy. A large 
part of his character and writings will become in- 
telligible if we keep it in mind. That his features 
had a strong Jewish cast, is evident from his por- 
traits, and was especially to be noted in old age. It 
may be conjectured that the migration of these 
Dutch Jews to England fell within a period not very 
distant from the death of Spinoza in 1675. But 


8 NEWMAN 


there is not the slightest trace in Newman of ac- 
quaintance with modern Hebrew literature or his- 
tory; so far as we can tell he had never opened the 
Ethics, and the only Mendelssohn he knew by 
name was probably the author of Elijah. 

But the qualities which he inherited from his 
mother’s family cannot be left out of account. The 
Fourdriniers were French by descent and Hugue- 
nots into the bargain; they had come into England 
on the revocation, in 1685, of the Edict of Nantes; 
had settled in London as engravers and paper-mak- 
ers; and had conformed to,the Established Church 
instead of lapsing—as the Martineaus did, for ex- 
ample—to Unitarian heterodoxy. Mrs. Newman 
taught her children a ‘“‘ modified Calvinism,” and 
they were expected at a proper age to go through 
the spiritual process known as “ conviction of sin,” 
to be followed in due course by “ conversion.” 
These experiences John Henry felt and has re- 
corded; they were very real to him. But equally 
lasting in its effects was the acquaintance made dur- 
ing the tenderest years of childhood with the Bible 
in King James’ version, as he learned it at his 
mother’s knee. ‘‘ It would be hardly too much to 
say,’ writes one observer, ‘‘ that he knew the Bible 
by heart.’’ Another, who lived with him in his 
Catholic days, tells us that he always took the old 
tivangelical view of Scripture as being verbally in- 


EARLY YEARS 9 


spired. And both would agree in considering that 
for him the Authorized Version was the Bible. His 
ear, delicately attuned to its harmonies, could not 
endure a novel rhythm. As Ruskin may be said to 
have built his lofty prose on the sacred text, familiar 
to his awakening sense of beauty in words, so New- 
man, while shrinking fastidiously from an applica- 
tion which he would have thought profane, was 
taught by it the grave severity, the chastened colour, 
and the passionate yet reserved tone, that lend to 
his sermons a more than human power. To them 
we may apply what he has written of great instru- 
mental symphonies, ‘‘ they have escaped from some 
higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal 
harmony in the medium of created sound; they are 
echoes from our Home; they are the voice of angels, 
or the Magnificat of saints, or the living laws 
of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attributes; 
something are they besides themselves, which we 
cannot compass, which we cannot utter.”” That 
something is the message enshrined. in Holy Writ, 
every figure and emblem of which became to this 
infant of genius an abiding reality. 

Undoubtedly he was precocious—imaginative, 
versatile, headstrong, and withal affectionate and 
sensitive, beyond any but the most gifted of children. 
He learned something fresh every day. At nine 
years old he was keeping a pocket-book diary, writ- 


10 NEWMAN 


ing verses on Nelson and other subjects, but critical 
of what he wrote—‘‘I think I shall burn it,” he 
concludes ; at twelve he composed ‘“‘a mock 
drama ”’; at fourteen “‘a sort of passion for scrib- 
bling ” came over him; he broke out into periodi- 
cals, The Spy and Anti-Spy, intended to answer 
one another; he devised a burlesque opera; and 
The Beholder which he attempted in 1816, ran 
through forty numbers. So incessant was his activ- 
ity until late in life; but the inward sense did not 
perish under it. On his early school days he made 
this curious reflection in 1820 or 1823, “I used to 
wish the Arabian Tales were true; my imagination 
ran on unknown influences, on magical powers and 
talismans. I thought life might be a dream, or I 
an angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow- 
angels by a playful device concealing themselves 
from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of 
a material world.” 

The home atmosphere in which he was brought 
up had all the gentle refinement which is accounted 
peculiarly English; but there ran through it a cur- 
rent of intellectual emotion, as is manifest from the 
remarkable yet opposite fortunes of John Henry 
and his two brothers. Francis, who won a brilliant 
double first at Oxford, went out to Persia as a mis- 
sionary, lost his faith in orthodox creeds, fell un- 


der the charm of Mr. Darby (who founded the 


EARLY YEARS II 


Plymouth Brethren), separated from his elder 
brother, and while capable of excellent work in 
literature, was content to translate the I/iad upon 
eccentric lines, and wasted his powers in movements 
that came to nothing. Charles Robert, scarcely 
known to fame, had a restless intellect and was pe- 
culiar to the verge of insanity; his views ended in 
utter unbelief; he became likewise a Socialist, but 
his temper and habits left him a burden on the Car- 
dinal down to his death in 1884. Francis survived 
until 1897. They were a long-lived family. Two 
of the sisters came to a great age; and of these Je- 
mima, to argue from her correspondence with John 
‘Henry, possessed not only an admirable style, but 
resolution and character in a high degree. 
Newman never attended a public school; but he 
was not much more than seven when his father sent 
him to Dr. Nicholas at Ealing. There were three 
hundred boys to meet and overcome; the shy lad 
passed rapidly before them all, but did not take part 
in any outdoor game; nevertheless he was already 
exercising a fascination on all with whom he formed 
an intimacy. His habit, from a boy, to compose, 
led him at fourteen or fifteen to imitate Addison; 
when he was seventeen he wrote in the style of John- 
son; about the same time he fell in with the twelfth 
volume of Gibbon; his ears rang with the cadence \ 
of his sentences, and he dreamed of it for a night 


12 NEWMAN 


or two. Then he began to make an analysis of 
Thucydides in Gibbon’s style. 

If the poet is born, the man of letters, though a 
genius, is made; he cannot simply invent the form 
in which he will express himself. Newman felt a 
strong drawing to mathematics and, had he been 
sent to Cambridge, might have turned out senior 
wrangler. But his ruling passion was literature, 
and that meant, under the circumstances of the time, 
Latin and Greek. It did not contemplate a knowl- 
edge of any English author, great or small; the 
world of foreign letters was quite unknown; and 
even the classic languages were studied with a mere 
tincture of scholarship, unenlightened by archae- 
ology and without a suspicion of philosophy, on a 
system from which every lineament of vital signifi- 
cance had been blotted out. Splendid as are the 
names of Porson and Bentley, their influence did 
not pass beyond a textual criticism with which cult- 
ure in the true bearing of the word had little to do. 
We may quote the severe but well authorized judg- 
ment of Pattison, looking back on that period: 
‘‘ Of the world of wisdom and sentiment, of poetry 
and philosophy, of social and political experience, 
contained in the Latin and Greek classics, . . . Ox- 
ford in 1830 had never dreamt.” The Renaissance 
was a genuine effort to recover from antiquity its 
secret and to renew its charm. But college tutors 


EARLY YEARS 13 


and “‘ Greek play ’’ bishops were alike incapable of 
understanding what was meant by the “‘ Humani- 
ties’ or the ‘“ Arts” they had been appointed to 
teach. “ Fancy a gentleman not knowing Greek! ”’ 
exclaimed Hurrell Froude when he was told that 
such unlearned mechanics sat in the reformed Par- 
liament. The classics became thus a sign of caste; 
gentlemen carried Horace in their pockets when 
they rode to hounds, or quoted lines of Virgil in 
addressing the House of Commons. But society 
was swathed in convention, and the great Whig or 
Tory dynasties ruled supreme. Literature had sunk 
to the level of an accomplishment; religion took on 
a different shade as it passed from rank to rank; 
science was denounced as infidel; the democratic 
idea was struggling to be born. Never, perhaps, 
had Britons found themselves more completely di- 
vided from the whole world than in the twenty years 
which followed on the abortive Peace of Amiens. 
Newman remembered as a child staring at the 
lights which, in the windows of his father’s house 
near Richmond, were kindled to celebrate the vic- 
tory of Trafalgar. He belonged to a generation 
of stay-at-homes, such as Miss Austen paints for us, 
and until he was over thirty had never left England. 
Nearly sixteen years junior to De Quincey, he yet 
breathed as insular an atmosphere and came under 
much the same influences. Both were omnivorous 


% 


Pl 


14 NEWMAN bac 


readers, instinct with refinements and sensibilities 
which have led some critics to describe them as in 
character feminine; and they owed not a little to 
companionship with mother and sisters. Highly 
self-conscious, brooding on their own thoughts from 
infancy—and those thoughts concerned with ever- 
lasting yet invisible realities—they might both “ re- 
turn thanks to Providence,’”’ as De Quincey did in 
fact, that they were “‘ dutiful and loving members 
of a pure, holy, and magnificent Church.” Both 
again fell early under the charm of English litera- 
ture—the opium-eater that was to be ranging 
through his father’s library, Newman at eight years 
old listening eagerly to the Lay of the Last 
Minstrel which his mother and aunt were reading 
aloud, and afterwards on summer mornings de- 
vouring in bed Waverley and Guy Mannering. 
We have spoken of the elder Newman’s devotion 
to Shakespeare, in whom, as he was fond of saying, 
he recognized a moral guide superior to preachers. 
It does not appear that John Henry felt any attrac- 
tion, now or later, towards the mighty Milton; nor 
does he seem to have wandered in the mazes of 
The Faérie Queen, or taken pleasure in the old 
dramatists or in Chaucer. But his versatile pen and 
inborn talent for rhetoric were already unmistak- 
able, when, in December, 1816, his father set out 
with him for Oxford. 


Qegr ‘YIbr younyy SAIvyY “1S Jo Av 
suimoaq pur ‘eget ‘Wyler judy [atid jo Me [ Paoa]a SPM UTUIMAN 


*paojxg ‘Ss, Are 3g pue ‘afal[oD [eto UND A 89 0 


ep Ws BG 


EARLY YEARS 15 


He used to relate “‘ in illustration of the seeming 
accidents on which our course of life and personal 
history turn,” that even when the post-chaise was 
at the door Mr. Newman “ was in doubt whether to 
direct the postboy to make for Hounslow, or for the 
first stage on the road to Cambridge.” Mr. Mul- 
lins, curate of St. James’, Piccadilly, helped him to 
a decision. After failing to get an entrance at Exe- 
ter, the youth—a mere lad not sixteen—was matric- 
ulated by Dr. Lee, the Vice-Chancellor, at his own 
College, Trinity. Dr. Nicholas pronounced it 
“most gentlemanlike”’; in June, 1817, Newman 
went into residence; he won a Trinity Scholarship 
in the following May. His tutor was Mr. Short, 
‘of whom it is on record that, meeting the happy 
father he went up to him and held out his hand ex- 
claiming, ‘““O Mr. Newman, what have you given 
us in your son!”” He was now a scholar for nine 
years at sixty pounds a year. 

These were not accidents in his eyes. ‘‘ Always 
waiting for indications,” says T. Mozley, ‘“ what- 
ever happened, for good or for ill, he acted upon 
it. It was a providential stepping-stone in a field 
of uncertainties.’ And again, “ for everything he 
did there was this foundation in circumstances; the 
secret of his career cannot be discovered without 
taking into account everything that happened about 
him.” Shall we conclude with Dr. Abbott, who 


16 NEWMAN 


has come forward to be the advocatus diaboli when 
others would canonize Newman, that “ his imagina- 
tion dominated his reason”? Or will it not be 
more critically exact to see in this trembling attitude 
of soul a marvellous sensibility, without which he 
could never have thrown himself into minds unlike 
his own, or acquired the exquisite delicacy of touch 
that renders thought as if it were the painter’s land- 
scape spread out before him in light and shade? We 
may go even a step farther. Imagination, with 
Newman, was reason, as with Carlyle, Words- 
worth, Goethe, and Shakespeare—not the bare me- 
chanical process that grinds out conclusions from 
letters of the alphabet, in what is at best a luminous 
void, but the swift sudden grasp of an explorer, 
making his way from crag to crag, under him the 
raging sea, above him sure ground and deliverance. 
Life was a game to be played, a task awaiting fulfil- 
" ment; in its smallest details Newman felt a particu- 
lar Providence, as Napoleon felt that he had a star, ‘ 
and as Schopenhauer has delineated the philosophy 
of all this with a master’s precision. Was not a 
man’s genius in old days the unseen Mentor that 
guided him by such passing intimations? It is clear 
that in Newman we have met once more the lonely 
pilgrim whose life is a voyage of discovery, and his 
path over undreamt-of waters. 

In 1819 his father’s bank suspended payment, 


EARLY YEARS 17 


but after a month settled in full with its creditors. 
The family appears to have been henceforth in 
somewhat straitened circumstances, and its mi- 
grations to Brighton, to Hampshire, and finally to 
the neighbourhood of Oxford interest us as show- 
ing Newman ina light at once amiable and pathetic. 
. For, greatly as his kinsfolk were attached to him, 
and however frequent their correspondence, no one 
at home could enter into the ideas which, little by 
little, melted away his hereditary Calvinism until 
it was all gone. The reaction from this gloomy but 
impressive creed which we trace in other men—dur- 
ing these very years it was that Carlyle underwent 
the experiences burnt with a pencil of fire into 
Sartor Resartus—began almost as soon as the 
young recluse caught a glimpse of the larger world 
at his University. He worked hard, sometimes as 
much as twelve hours a day in the twenty weeks pre- 
ceding his examination (November, 1820) for the 
bachelor’s degree. But, “ being called up a day 
sooner than he expected, he lost his head, utterly 
broke down, and had to retire.” He passed, it is 
true, but “‘ in the lower division of the second class 
of honours.” 

This misfortune he retrieved brilliantly; he be- 
came Fellow of Oriel on April 12, 1822—a day 
which he judged to be the turning-point in his life 
and of all days most memorable. “‘ It raised him,” 


18 NEWMAN 


he said long afterwards, ‘‘ from obscurity and need 
to competency and reputation”; it “ opened upon 
him a theological career, placing him on the high 
and broad platform of University society and in- 
telligence’’; and it brought him across the teach- 
ing of those various schools whereby the religious 
sentiment in his mind was led on, as he considered, 
to its legitimate issue. 

But, even yet, he had not decided on taking 
orders. He never wished anything better than “ to 
live and die Fellow of Oriel.’ He admired, he 
loved, Whately, whom he compared to a “ bright 
June sun tempered by a March north-easter.”” He 
was bashful, awkward, attachable, a good listener, 
and showed a “ special facility of entering into ideas 
as soon as, or before, they were expressed.” 
Whately, in return, called him the clearest-headed 
man he knew, took him out walking and riding, 
made him the anvil on which to hammer into shape 
his projected Logic, and in 1825, when promoted 
to the headship of Alban Hall, appointed him Vice- 
Principal. They often differed on religious ques- 
tions; but Newman thought he had been under 
Whately’s influence during the four years from 
1822 till 1826; and that from him he learned “‘ the 
idea of the Christian Church as a Divine appoint- 
ment, and as a substantive visible body, inde- 
pendent of the State, endowed with rights, preroga- 
tives, and powers of its own.” 


EARLY YEARS 19 


After keeping some terms at Lincoln’s Inn, 
Newman gave up secular ambitions, took orders in 
1824, and accepted the curacy of St. Clement’s, a 
parish lying over Magdalen Bridge. His ambition 
was now utterly impersonal, his calling fixed, as he 
tells Francis Newman on the latter’s birthday in 
1826, “‘a high employ, nor lightly given, to serve 
as messengers of Heaven.” He gloried in it— 


Deep in my heart that gift I hide, 
I change it not away 

For patriot warrior’s hour of pride, 
Or statesman’s tranquil sway ; 

For poet’s fire, or pleader’s skill 

To pierce the soul and tame the will. 


Never robust, suffering from toothache, occa- 
sional deafness, and weak eyes, he was yet capable 
of endless work and application. He wrote so 
much that his wrist ached; his voice, an exceedingly 
musical one, the memory of which lingers like an 
echo in hearts beyond counting, was so weak as to 
form an objection when the new charge was pro- 
posed; and his whole person, spare and ascetic, re- 
called the Methodist of a bygone period rather 
than the flourishing incumbent who made the best 
of both worlds. But he was ceasing to be an Evan- 
gelical, so far as he had ever been one. Hawkins, 
not as yet Provost of Oriel, had taught him the 


20 NEWMAN 


doctrine of a living tradition by which the Bible 
is to be interpreted; other Catholic dogmas fol- 
lowed; in 1825 he began the study of Butler’s great 
but difficult work, the Analogy. Personal experi- 
ence led him to note down that “ the religion which 
he had received from John Newton and Thomas 
Scott would not work in a parish,” and that “ Cal- 
vinism was not a key to the phenomena of human 
nature, as they occur in the world.” However, 
“ for a long while certain shreds and tatters of that 
doctrine hung about his preaching” ; nor did he, 
for a whole ten years, altogether sever himself from 
those ‘‘ great religious societies which were then, 
as now, the rallying ground and the strength of the 
Evangelical body.” 

On the other hand, in 1829 he broke with 
Whately. The occasion was Sir Robert Peel’s 
candidature at Oxford as the reluctant advocate of 
Catholic Emancipation. The cause lay deeper. 
Newman had no views on the subject; but he was 
eager to stand up for the independence of the 
Church and University, even though in doing so he 
must take arms against the “‘ great Captain,” Well- 
ington. By this time he was tutor in Oriel; he had 
won the friendship of Pusey, to whom he looked up 
as a Saint; he was imbibing every day fresh draughts 
of medieval Christianity in conversation with Hur- 
rell Froude; and as Vicar of St. Mary’s, to which. 


EARLY YEARS 21 


he had been collated when Hawkins, thanks to his 
vote and influence, became Provost, he held a very 
eminent place, where he might put forward effect- 
ively his new-found conception of the Catholic 
Church. In writing to his mother he expresses what 
he felt with energy and eloquence. The talent of 
the day was against the Church; its reliance, he 
says, with a smile of vexation, was on prejudice and 
bigotry; but the “wisdom of our ancestors,” in- 
cluding revealed truth, might even thus be trans- 
mitted from one generation to another, and so it 
would triumph. ‘‘ Great men alone can prove 
great ideas or grasp them.” In the Apologia, 
Newman declares that he took part against Mr. 
Peel “ on a simple academical, not at all a political 
or an ecclesiastical, ground’; but his letters at the 
time exult in asserting that ‘‘ the poor defenceless 
Church has borne the brunt of it, and I see in it the 
strength and unity of Churchmen.” Did a philo- 
sophic historian trace to 1829 and the Catholic 
Emancipation that movement which was to be 
called before long the Tractarian, he would have 
much to say in his defence. 

For the established system was breaking up; 
where Catholics came in, Jews and unbelievers must 
logically follow; “‘ I do believe,” said Newman of 
the Anglican Church, “‘ it will be ultimately sepa- 
rated from the State’’; and where then would be 


22 NEWMAN 


its security? The answer he gave was “‘in its Sac- 
raments’’; and thus we are brought in sight of 
‘ Apostolic Succession,” with its appeal to Fathers 
in East and West, to antiquity, to Alexandria, An- 
tioch, and Rome, as the undivided communion of 
primitive Christians. 

Our concern, we repeat, is with Newman as an 
English man of letters; but without reference to 
the texture of his beliefs and the times and moments 
at which they were acquired, it would be impossible 
to measure the energy with which he exercised his 
mental powers or rightly to estimate their char- 
acter. Carlyle, in a splenetic mood, was for deny- 
ing to Newman the quality of intellect; he could not 
imagine a mind intent on visions of churches and 
creeds as if they were revelations from the Unseen. 
But to the Oxford student of 1830 they came with 
a solemn grandeur and a heavenly light upon them, 
not less awe-inspiring than the symbols beheld by 
Ezekiel or Isaiah under the ancient Covenant. 
They were full of poetry as of prophecy. “An 
imaginative devotion to the Fathers and their 
times ’’ had been the effect of reading about them 
at school in Joseph Milner’s Church History—a 
forgotten book. The first centuries were his beau- 
ideal of Christianity. He projected writing on 
them in 1826 for the Encyclopedia Metropolitana. 
His Life of Apollonius, and Essay on Miracles, 


EARLY YEARS 23 


both dealing with problems of those ages, appeared 
in 1825. And in 1828 he began systematically to 
read the Fathers themselves. 

From this time his tongue was loosened; he spoke 
spontaneously and without effort; he gained upon 
his pupils, learned how to preach, not as a pulpit 
orator, but with insight and authority as having a 
messuge, and entered into the secret thoughts of 
Froude and Keble, who were destined to make up 
with him a famous triumvirate. Keble’s Chris- 
tian Year came out in 1827, and at once achieved 
a popularity which it has maintained ever since. 
Thoughtful and soothing, it is not poetry of the 
highest order; it lacks the Dantean flame in which 
all things are transmuted to colours of a super- 
natural world; neither has it the passion or the pity 
of Christina Rossetti’s intense white light. ‘‘ With 
the Prayer-book for his guide,” says Anthony 
Froude, ‘‘ Keble has provided us with a manual of 
religious sentiment . . . beautifully expressed in 
language which every one can understand and re- 
member. High Churchmanship had been hitherto 
dry and formal; Keble carried into it the emotions 
of Evangelicalism, while he avoided angry collision 
with Evangelical opinions. Thus all parties could 
find much to admire in him and little to suspect.” 

This may have been the case; yet he stands to- 
wards Newman in a peculiar attitude, almost as 


24 NEWMAN 


representing the last of the Nonjurors by his rever- 
ence for episcopal authority and a Church untainted 
with concessions to Erastian or lay interference. 
Keble was an elegant scholar, from whose rarely 
opened lips pearls and diamonds of wisdom 
dropped when listeners were congenial; he could 
not brook, as he did not understand, variety of 
opinions; and charming as he proved to all who 
would not contradict him, none was constitutionally 
less fitted to be at the head of a great party. His 
genius had in it no elements deserving the name of 
original thought. Rather did he serve Newman 
as the living embodiment of institutions now 
deemed Apostolic and, so to speak, as himself a 
present antiquity. He possessed none of those gifts 
which strike and subdue the unconverted. 

Hurrell Froude, the ‘‘ bright and beautiful,” cut 
off in the midst of his days, was another sort of 
man. ‘‘ He went forward,” says his brother An- 
thony, ‘‘ taking the fences as they came, passing 
lightly over them all, and sweeping his friends 
along with him. He had the contempt of an in- 
tellectual aristocrat for private judgment.” This, 
which sounds like a bull, but is only a paradox, was 
equally applicable to Newman, despite his infinite 
consideration for persons as they came before him. 
“The Many ” could be neither wise nor right, ex- 
cept when they listened to the Few who were both. 


EARLY YEARS 25 


It was Froude that made Newman and Keble really 
known to each other; he boasted of it as the one 
good thing he had ever done. It was certainly the 
most important. “ You and Keble are the philoso- 
phers, and I the rhetorician,” wrote the Vicar of 
St. Mary’s to him in 1836. There was so much of 
a foundation in the contrast that Newman did 
always look to Froude as a standard, a test and a 
light, by which to judge of his own utterances. He 
seemed able to write nothing confidently, unless 
it had Froude’s imprimatur. But he disclaimed 
being original as other men have prided themselves 
upon it. Thoughts and speculations, nevertheless, 
were his daily bread. He stirred, and if he could 
not convince, he irritated into a dim wonder at his 
boldness men like H. J. Rose, who were for stand- 
ing on the old paths, not ambitious to explore the 
strange new country of the Middle Ages. Alone 
among Newman’s correspondents he writes as his 
born equal, criticizing freely, breaking out into the 
genial humour, so fresh and unconstrained, which 
lights up this all too serious intercourse of country 
parsons, London dignitaries, and unfledged Oxford 
dons. 

For it was not the great world seething with 
revolution, yet large in its perplexities, of France 
or Germany during these years, that roused them 
to action, but a movement of which the measure 


26 NEWMAN 


was taken from Bentham, Brougham, and the 
Edinburgh Review. If we turn to Carlyle’s letters 
and essays—thoughts of a mason’s son amid the 
wild wet moors of Craigenputtock—which brood 
over the same problems at that very hour, we shall 
be struck with amazement to see them so unlike. 
But the solitary thinker, cut adrift from tradition, 
who cannot find a place in his University and dare 
not take orders, has become an Ishmael, eating his 
heart for savageness. He asks with Novalis or 
Richter, ‘‘ Canst thou believe man has yet found 
religion? Where is its flaming tabernacle, then?” 
The established order had traced its lines about 
Newman and Froude. But on following them 
backward—and all Oxford studies tended that way, 
like the Virgilian oracle “ Antiquam exquirite 
matrem ’’—how could they not arrive in sight of 
Rome? 

Froude, according to his illustrious friend (and 
shall we say pupil?) had a keen insight into 
abstract truth, but was “an Englishman to the 
backbone in his severe adherence to the real and 
the concrete.” This latter quality is also, in a won- 
derful degree, Jewish; it marks every page of New-- 
man’s, even those which seem at first merely specu- 
lative; and as Froude ‘“‘ delighted in the notion of 
an hierarchical system, of sacerdotal power, and of 
ecclesiastical liberty,” he would appear when pro- 


EARLY YEARS 27 


fessing openly his admiration for the Church of 
Rome and his hatred of the Reformers, to be doing 
little more than copying out the Old Testament in 
black letter. How close is the resemblance between 
the medieval Papacy and the Hebrew theocracy, 
has often been observed. Nor should we forget 
with what intense and unremitting meditation the 
most Jewish chapters of the Bible were dwelt upon 
in sermons and “ Sabbath schools” down to a 
period which lies within the memory of men not 
aged. To substitute Rome for Israel, impossible 
in the Scotland of John Knox, did not seem out of 
nature in Oxford, once the surface-colouring of a 
Puritanism, never there comfortably at home, had 
been spunged away. Events were now calling for 
the bold yet not foreign genius that should do this 
thing. ‘ Newman,”. concludes Mark Pattison 
justly, being a theologian first of all, ‘“‘ was made 
a leader, not by the loss of college preferment, but 
by the pressure of public events on his Church 
sentiments.” , 

Most assuredly; yet the interior tragi-comedy of 
Oriel in 1828-30 bore a singular likeness to the 
public disaster which eleven years afterwards, on 
occasion of Tract Ninety, drove Newman out of 
Oxford to Littlemore. Keen as he showed him- 
self in judging his fellows, quick as he might be to 
seize upon every coign of vantage from which to 


28 NEWMAN 


spread his views, he had perpetrated a fatal error 
in voting for Hawkins rather than Keble as Pro- 
vost. Hawkins, an able administrator, went on the 
old scheme which, if it did not further University 
reform, gave no chance of turning the college into 
a school or seminary, where the Laudian ideas 
might be revived, the Fathers read and translated, 
and the spirit of “‘ Liberalism ” exorcised by a dedi- 
cation of intellect to Christian uses. “These ends, 
Newman dreamt, could be successfully achieved, 
were the tutors entirely responsible—almost, let us 
say, as spiritual directors—for the undergraduates, 
and a body of Fellows chosen like-minded with 
himself, Keble and Froude. 

As might be anticipated, Hawkins would not 
abdicate his supremacy; the revolutionary tutors 
were displaced, and Newman’s occupation within 
the college was gone. He remained Vicar of St. 
Mary’s; but Oriel no longer afforded him a regular 
breeding-ground on which his ideas might grow and 
flourish. Perhaps, if Hawkins had been more 
acquiescent, the mind which now sought expression 
in Tracts for the Times and a correspondence em- 
bracing all England, would in the calling of a tutor 
have busied itself with the idea and scope of Uni- 
versity education, as it did twenty years later, not 
wandering from its aim, but addressing the culti- 
vated intellect rather than the unknown public. We 


*evgi “salpnys jo ashoy] v oyu peur UBUIMOANS TOU 


*paojxQ JvaU ‘aTOUIA[IITT Je SAAEIIOD AY TL JUNOT A EL &9 070g 


EARLY YEARS 29 


need scarcely remark that literature has gained by 
the exchange while liberal education has not lost. 
There are no works in the language more stimu- 
lating, as there are few more admirably fitted in 
tone and style to their subject, than the Dublin 
Lectures, wherein a University is described as 
being “‘ the special seat of that large philosophy 
which embraces and locates truth of every kind, 
and every method of attaining it.” 

That Newman held this master-key in 1830 who 
will believe? He was yet insular, like all his gen- 
eration at Oxford, in idea not less than in knowl- 
edge. Dean Stanley’s epigram is celebrated: 
“‘ How different the fortunes of the Church of Eng- 
land, if Newman had been able to read German! ” 
Pattison, who reports it, observes that he ‘‘ assumed 
and adorned the narrow basis on which Laud had 
stood two hundred years before”; and he adds, 
not without bitterness, ‘‘ All the grand develop- 
ment of human reason, from Aristotle down to 
Hegel, was a sealed book to him.” So far as these 
words imply that Newman, though familiar with 
Oxford text-books, which included the Ethics and 
the Rhetoric, did not feel called to open the 
great metaphysicians, they are accurate. In ex- 
treme old age he wrote toa friend: ‘“‘ I never read 
a word of Kant. I never read a word of Cole- 
ridge. . . . I could say the same of Hurrell 


30 NEWMAN 


Froude, and also of Pusey and Keble, as far as I 
have a right to speak of others.” 

“The academical institutions of some parts of 
Europe,” said Dugald Stewart, glancing at Oxford 
half a century earlier, “ are not without their use 
to the historian of the human mind. Immovably 
moored to the same station by the strength of their 
cables and the weight of their anchors, they enable 
him to measure the rapidity of the current by which 
the rest of mankind is borne along.” ‘To men so 
trained culture was synonymous with classic antiq- 
uity, religion meant unquestioning belief in the 
Bible, and the Church of England was its guardian. 
History, not experience, held in it the revelation 
of all that was true or beautiful; and where was 
the shrine or habitat of history? On the shores 
of the Mediterranean; not along the wind-blown 
paths of Norsemen sailing over misty seas, but in 
the track of the Crusader, with Rome lifted high 
between north and south, as inheriting its religion 
from Sion, its arts and letters from Athens, a con- 
crete, ever-living reality, mother of Churches and 
of civilisation. In the curiously symbolic drama 
which Newman made of all that befel him, what 
could be more fitting than his pilgrimage (far more 
significant than Childe Harold’s) to the seas and 
shores where antiquity had wrought its wonders, 
and, above all, to the City on the Seven Hills, saint 
or sorceress, but the home of his life’s idea? 


CHAPTER II 
THE TRACTARIANS 


ALways in delicate health, Hurrell Froude was 
ordered in the winter of 1832 to try the benefit of 
a Mediterranean voyage. His father and New- 
man went with him. It turned out to be exception- 
ally cold in those latitudes, nor was Hurrell a very 
prudent invalid. He came back only to die. His 
friend had been exhausted in writing, which meant 
endlessly revising, a volume called at length The 
Arians of the Fourth Century, but always a frag- 
ment, intended once as a prelude to the histery of 
the Councils or, as we might now define it, of dog- 
matic creeds. . This great design failed; the in- 
spiration which led Newman to entertain it lasted 
on until, as a Roman Cardinal in 1885, he put 
forth his amended and very striking translations 
from St. Athanasius. 

He was already deep in the school of Alexandria 
—mystical, ascetic, uncompromising, and yet more 
liberal in its St. Clement towards Greeks and un- 
believers generally than the African-Roman, of 
which Tertullian is the dogmatist and St. Augus- 

31 


32 NEWMAN 


tine the philosopher. This was to be Newman’s 
attitude through life. He is a Greek of Alexan- 
dria. His Grammar of Assent might have been 
dictated in its most telling chapters by Dionysius, 
the false Areopagite, who was in fact an Egyp- 
tian; his University Sermons go back, for aught I 
know, directly to the same profound source, that 
little golden book on the Divine Names from 
which St. Thomas Aquinas is never weary of 
quoting. 

‘The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen 
carried me away,” writes Newman in his Apologia, 
“and I have drawn out some features of it with 
the zeal and freshness, but with the partiality, of 
a neophite. Some portions of their teaching, mag- 
nificent in themselves, came like music to my inward 
ear. [hese were based on the mystical or sacra- 
mental principle, and spoke of the various Econo- 
mies or Dispensations of the Eternal. . . . Nat- 
ure was a parable; Scripture was an allegory; 
pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, prop- 
erly understood, were but a preparation for the 
Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a 
certain sense prophets; for ‘ thoughts beyond their 
thought to those high bards were given.’ There 
had been a directly Divine dispensation granted to 
the Jews; but there had been in some sense a dis- 
pensation carried on in favour of the Gentiles. 


THE TRACTARIANS 33 


. .. In the fulness of time both Judaism and 
Paganism had come to nought. . . . And thus 
room was made for the anticipation of further and 
deeper disclosures, of truths still under the veil of 
the letter, and in their season to be revealed. The 
visible world still remains without its Divine in- 
terpretation; Holy Church in her sacraments and 
her hierarchical appointments, will remain, even to 
the end of the world, after all but a symbol of those 
heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her mysteries 
are but the expression in human language of truths 
to which the human mind is unequal.” 

Long as is the above quotation, it deserves the 
most careful scrutiny at the hands of those who 
would enter into the mind of Newman, early or 
late. It might, indeed, be taken in so many words 
from the Areopagite, who himself has drawn out 
felicitously the Catholic view regarding the nature 
of Deity on the one side and the laws of its mani- 
festation on the other. But it will be serviceable, 
above all, when we desire to understand what is 
meant by calling Newman a “ sceptic,” and how it 
comes to pass that in his Sermons we may see with 
‘Dean Church “the enormous irruption into the 
world of modern thought, of the unknown and the 
unknowable.’”’ Here again is the process of devel- 
opment, since termed evolution, applied to Bible, 
Church and dogma. Here too is the spirit of a re- 


34 NEWMAN 


fined criticism which, granting to language all it 
can attempt, is on its guard against the shallow 
logic that takes words for realities and symbols for 
what they represent. A slight change of dialect 
would transport us to Weimar and Goethe med- 
itating with Faust on the Unnameable. 

We must bear this in remembrance when it is 
urged that philosophy was to Newman a sealed 
book. He had a philosophy of his own, vast and 
overshadowed with eternal mysteries, akin rather 
to the poet’s deep creative reason than to the 
diagrams of a school-teacher. How strongly 
imaginations like these tend to the rhythmic form 
will not need proving; Orpheus with his lute in 
Greek myths, and David in the Psalms, will be suffi- 
cient examples. Nor could a genius nourished on 
Sophocles fail to echo the sounding lines of ancient 
chorus or strophe, not seeking renown, but as a 
medium for thoughts which were haunting him day 
and night. 

Newman wrote verse from boyhood. In the 
Memorials of the Past poems are given which 
abound in touches, brief yet noticeable, that suggest 
an experience of doubt, conflict, terror, and even 
remorse, parallel with self-accusations, when he is 
writing to his mother, so vehement that their tone 
has been censured as morbid. They belong to a 
stage known in spiritual writers as the “ dark night 


DHES PRACTARIANS 35 


of the soul,” and are morbid if the Valley of the 
Shadow drawn by a seer and an artist be deemed 
nothing better than fiction. 

Newman was terribly in earnest; he believed that 
there was “‘ some strange original defect in human 
nature,” meaning, first of all, in his own. ‘“‘ We 
are in the dark about ourselves,” he told men; 
‘when we act, we are groping in the dark, and 
may meet with a fall at any moment. . . . In our 
attempts to influence and move our minds, we are 
making experiments (as it were) with some deli- 
cate and dangerous instrument, which works we do 
not know how, and may produce unexpected and 
disastrous effects. The management of our hearts 
is quite above us.” 

These poems now received additions, some of 
which will endure while English is spoken. They 
are a sea-cycle, worthy to be inscribed ‘“‘ Mari 
Magno,” both as written on the great deep, and 
calling to another of which it was the image in its 
loveliness, whether of clouds or sunshine. From 
the day when, waiting for the ship, he asked, ‘‘ Are 
these the tracks of some unearthly friend?” in De- - 
cember, 1832, until he quitted Marseilles in the 
following June, Newman committed to paper no 
less than eighty-five poems, expressing his thoughts 
on the life within, the saints of the Old Testament, 
and the hopes, fears and resolves which, clustering 


36 NEWMAN 


round the Church and its fortunes, impelled him on 
his future course. The Tractarian Movement, 
begun politically when Catholic Emancipation was 
granted, here sprang forth armed in lyrical strains, 
challenging the world with no uncertain sound. 
We may register the moment: the Hermes is off 
Cape Ortegal, which stands up “ magnificent in 
outline,” on December 11, 1832, and the seer, as 
with an angel’s voice, calls upon those who have, 
through “private judgment,” lost their way, to 
come home, for “‘a mother pleads” who “ now 
lifts her from the dust, to reign as in her youth.” 
Himself, he continues to meditate, a bold warder, 
though but one, will never faint; England is the 
Tyre of the West, and is warned not to let “ rash 
tongues the Bride of Heaven defy”; the Church 
has long been patient, nay “‘ the heathen’s jest,” 
but ‘‘ now the shadows break, and gleams divine 
edge the dim distant line”; the “‘ might of truth ” 
is “‘ lodged in the few, obeyed, and yet unseen.” 


Reared on lone heights and rare 
His saints their watch-flame bear. 
And the mad world sees the wide-circling blaze, 
Vain searching whence it streams, and how to quench its 
rays. 


Thoughts like these, cast into rugged sincere 
verse, pursue the sea-farer as he drives along by 


THE TRACTARIANS 37 


Lisbon to Trafalgar and Gibraltar, to Algiers, 
where he gazes on the ruined Church of Africa, 
glorious in its martyrs and apologists, now the prey 
of Islam, to Malta and the Isles of Greece. He is 
more a Christian than a classical pilgrim; Hebrew 
names inspire the stanzas of his inditing off Ithaca 
and Corcyra; if he muses on the combatants in 
Thucydides, it is to reflect that their ‘‘ spirits live 
in awful singleness, each in its self-formed sphere 
of light or gloom.” He rebukes his heart at Mes- 
sina that it still yearns “‘ towards these scenes of 
ancient heathen fame”’; and in his first Sicilian 
expedition he has dreams which startle yet cheer, 
as warnings from on high. He is always alone, 
even while his friends are near him; in the long 
succession of lyrics he does not mention them. And 
so, like Ulysses after an enchanted voyage, he finds 
himself in Rome. 

His letter-journals abound in colour, local or 
picturesque; they belong to the days before steam, 
and never lose sight of England; medieval Europe 
is known to them as little as modern; but they speak 
as if “the whole Western world were tending to- 
wards some dreadful crisis.” Newman had begun 
to hope that England might still be the “ Land of 
Saints.” He was in an apocalyptic mood as he 
travelled from Naples, which disappointed him, 
along the Via Appia and over the Campagna to 


38 NEWMAN 


that place called Babylon in his Puritan story 
books. 

It overcame him. ‘‘ And now what can I say 
of Rome,” he exclaims, “‘ but that it is the first of 
cities, and that all I ever saw are but as dust (even 
dear Oxford) compared with its majesty and 
glory?”’ It grew more wonderful to him every 
day. ‘‘ How shall I name thee, Light of the wide 
West? or heinous error’s seat?” ‘This had been 
his question, but it ended in a cry to Christian 
Rome, “O Mother!” which recalls the tender in- 
vocation of the Georgics,—“ Salve magna Parens 

. magna virum! ”—while the famous lines in 
the First Eclogue describe ‘“‘ keenly and affection- 
ately ’’ what he was feeling, ‘‘ quite abased ” to be 
standing in the City of the Apostles. He must in- 
voke a ‘“‘proper pride” lest he should prove dis- 
loyal to “‘ sacred”? Oxford. Was it possible that 
so serene and lofty a place could be the “ cage of 
unclean creatures’? He would not believe it with- 
out evidence. These were the impressions, “ like 
seeds sown in the mind,” under which he went back 
to Sicily. He was drawn to that loveliest of islands 
as by a loadstone—wandered solitary by Taor- 
mina, Syracuse and Catania into the centre, making 
for Palermo, and was stricken with fever and laid 
up at Castro Giovanni, where he nearly died. 

His account of this expedition is pathetic—an 


THE TRACTARIANS 39 


admirable piece of self-portraiture, abounding in 
dreams, through which runs the cry of deprecation, 
“ T have not sinned against light.” He had written 
during the cholera in 1832, “one is destined for 
some work which is yet undone ”’; he had repeated 
the thought to Wiseman in Rome, and it was now 
strong upon him while he seemed at death’s 
door. 

Recovering, he was detained, homesick and deso- 
late, in Palermo; there, soothed by his visits to the 
sanctuaries of which it has so many, he wrote, ‘‘ O 
that thy creed were sound, thou Church of Rome!” 
He sailed at last in an orange-boat, and as a calm 
held them one whole week in the Straits of Boni- 
facio, his heart breathed out its deepest aspirations, 
“Lead, kindly Light!” “This most tender of 
pilgrim songs may be termed the “‘ March ” of the 
Tractarian Movement. It is pure melody, austere 
yet hopeful, strangely not unlike the stanzas which 
Carlyle has made familiar to the whole English 
race, the ““ Mason-song’”’ of Goethe, in its sublime 
sadness and invincible tiust. Both are Psalms of 
Life, Hebrew or Northern, chanted in a clear- 
obscure where faith moves onward heroically to the 
day beyond. 

Newman reached England and his mother’s 
house on July 9, 1833. His brother Francis had 
arrived from Persia some few hours before. On 


40 NEWMAN 


Sunday, the 14th, Keble preached the Assize Ser- 
mon in St. Mary’s, foreboding “ National Apos- 
tasy.” To his friend, an observer of days, this 
became the starting-point which was speedily to 
involve not only Oxford but the whole country in a 
religious agitation, the term of which, after seventy 
years, is far from approaching. 

‘I have no romantic story to tell,” wrote New- 
man with his usual modesty, when he came to the 
end of that Sicilian episode. But his next ten years 
in Oxford went through all the scenes of a drama 
with its due catastrophe, and he was chief actor 
in it. 

Now is the time for a comparison no less re- 
markable than just between the city on the Isis and 
Florence, between the preacher in St. Mary’s pulpit 
and Savonarola. It cannot be wrought out here 
in detail; suffice it that, like the Dominican friar, 
Newman spoke, Bible in hand, from intense per- 
sonal conviction which was equal to prophetic in- 
sight, of a judgment or crisis overhanging the na- 
tion; that he believed in a Theocracy; that his 
crowd of followers or penitents displayed a zeal, 
and often an extravagance, as great as the Piagnoni 
exhibited round the evangelist of San Marco; that 
after a season of astonishing success the tide turned; 
and that, as the one ended in death, inflicted on him 
with Papal sanction, so the other was driven into 


THE TRACTARIANS 41 


exile and at last was compelled to forsake the 
Church he had loved with utter self-sacrifice. 
Savonarola condemned the Pagan Renaissance; 
Newman the French Revolution. Both were severe 
in their judgment upon luxury, yet no enemies to 
Christian art. The Reformers claimed Savonarola; 
Liberals now and again discover elements in New- 
man which they would fain appropriate. In neither 
case will the argument hold good. When the in- 
fluence of the friar died in his funeral-flames, 
Paganism triumphed; Newman’s secession gave 
the sign to his opponents that now they might re- 
model the University, and “‘ repudiate sacerdotal 
principles.” High Church went down; John Stuart 
Mill reigned in its stead; the logic of Nominalism 
made room for Darwin, Huxley and Spencer; a 
great reaction had brought upon itself a greater 
defeat. But Newman’s Apologia is a literary 
monument to which nothing written by Savonarola 
can be paralleled. In history the Florentine will 
always be a discomfited prophet; the Oxford 
student will survive and be admired even by those 
who cannot endure his principles. The one is a 
grand reminiscent, the other an English Classic. 
“No great work was ever done by a system. . . 
Luther was an individual,” on these maxims relying 
Newman “out of his own head” began the 
Tracts while others were forming associations 


42 NEWMAN 


which came to grief in no long time, or signed in- 
effectual addresses to the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury. But, says Mozley, Newman “had seen 
enough of societies. He did not like committees. 
He suspected everything Metropolitan.” He was 
always ready to ‘‘ accept the suggestion of times, 
circumstances and persons,” and made no scruple 
of allowing “‘ people to believe themselves the 
original movers, if it were at all possible.” The 
Tracts should be a series. He took the idea from 
Evangelicals, only directing it now upon the clergy 
themselves. 

But he, among all the contributors, was the only 
one who could write this peculiar kind of literature. 
He did his task supremely well. The short pithy 
saying, the loaded or italic type, the single line, the 
crisp dialogue, the confident tone—in all this he 
showed himself a past master. Tracts really such 
gave way too soon before the ponderous treatise, 
the dissertation, or the essay. Newman had the 
gifts of a journalist, and his first attempts were no 
less bold than the “‘ petites lettres” which made 
Pascal famous, or the flysheets of Paul Louis 
Courier. If, however, we would see him at his 
best, incisive, convinced, ironical, and keen as a 
rapier, we should follow him through his letters to 
the Times in 1841, directed against Sir Robert 
Peel, and curiously inscribed “‘ The Tamworth 


1844. 


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THE TRACTARIANS 43 


Reading Room.’ ‘They are short pamphlets, 
brilliant with epigram, passionate and yet self- 
controlled, from which we shall quote by-and-by, 
when we require illustrations of his logical theory. 

But from the Tracts we need not quote; as litera- 
ture they are obsolete. When they demand a 
“second Reformation,” but in a Catholic sense, this 
belongs to their matter, not their form, and our only 
question is whether they will be read for style, as 
Pascal is read in the Provinciales by those who are 
neither Jansenists nor Jesuits; nay, as Lessing is 
read in the Anti-Goetze by those who think his 
“enlightened” views quite as shallow as the Lu- 
theran Bibliomania which he overthrows. To this 
query a negative must be returned. No single 
Tract is immortal. That which deals with the par- 
allel difficulties of Church and Bible (No. 85) is 
a rare specimen of courage in stating objections and 
of subtlety, exercised on the lines of Bishop Butler, 
in meeting them. ‘There are passages of solemn 
beauty in the Tract on Antichrist. Speaking gen- 
erally, however, had Newman composed only tracts 
he would now be forgotten. His undying fame 
rests on the sermons which he published as an 
Anglican or a Catholic; on certain of his Poems; 
on the originality of thought and grace of manner 
which distinguish the Essay on Development; on 
the University Lectures; and on the copious auto- 


44 NEWMAN 


biography which, running through his correspond- 
ence, gives a singular charm to Loss and Gain, is 
not absent from Callista, and culminates in that 
heart-subduing work of genius, the Apologia pro 
Vita Sua. | 

Newman’s intense reserve combined with his 
Puritan training to make him as formal, in his first 
literary efforts, as Ruskin when he was composing 
his Modern Painters at twenty-four. But while 
Ruskin matured his Johnsonian style into one still 
more splendid, the Oxford preacher, who had to 
speak face to face with living men, sharpened and 
shortened his own, until it might be compared to 
a rapid fire of musketry in which every shot told. 
It was always academic, never popular. His audi- 
ence read Cicero as he did; they caught the allu- 
sions, however passing, to Aristotle and Butler; 
they expected to hear much of Old Testament his- 
tory with morals drawn from it. That which was 
fresh and taking, in sermons bare of rhetoric, was 
the deep knowledge, conveyed in a style fastidi- 
ously simple, which they revealed of the heart of 
man, his conflict with unseen powers, his Prome- 
. thean pride and solitude where he hung amid the 
mountain-peaks, defying the God whom he dared 
not disown. 

Of the Bible Newman said on his parting with 
old friends and the Anglican pulpit in 1843, “ its 


THE TRACTARIANS 45 


language veils our feelings while it gives expression 
to them.” Under that veil his hearers knew that 
a spirit from the world which lies beyond sense 
was recording his thoughts, trials, temptations, as 
if one of themselves. Every sermon was an ex- 
perience. The still figure, the clear, low, penetrat- 
ing voice, the mental hush that fell upon his audi- 
ence while he meditated, alone with the Alone, in 
words of awful austerity,—“‘ to every one of us 
there are but two beings in the whole world, him- 
self and God,” as he told them,—brought out with 
unexampled force ‘‘ that pale and solemn scene” 
which faith must ever fix its gaze upon. ‘‘ We 
have each the same secret and we keep it to our- 
selves,” he wrote, translating into religion the 
word of Terence, ‘‘ Nihil humani a me alienum.”’ 
His discourses were poems, but transcripts too 
from the soul, reasonings in a heavenly dialectic, 
and views of life, seen under innumerable lights, 
as from some Pisgah-mount of vision. 

They can be read after all the years, for their 
illustrations, their lucid English, their exquisite 
brief touches of pathos, their creative faculty, as 
real as Dante’s yet altogether different, by which 
they call up the dead or the past or the invisible 
to our shrinking presence. Newman never paints. 
He deals not in colours as did Carlyle; he is with- 
out dimensions; for him (and let us bear it in 


46 NEWMAN 


mind) not the eye but the ear is that spiritual organ 
to which revelation is vouchsafed. His sentences 
glide upon a musical scale; he flows along as a 
river, is not fixed on canvas; in all his pages it 
would be hard to find a portrait of the outward 
man. His method may be termed introspection, 
but so deep and persistent that it leaves a feeling 
of concrete substance; and this we shall assume to 
be the Hebrew genius, exemplified in the Psalms, 
which show us landscape but no human features, 
or in St. Paul, the artist of moods beyond painting. 

To Newman, in fact, the lineaments whether 
of the world or the individual are writ in water, 
unstable as unreal. The “laws of nature” were 
referred by him to personal agencies behind the 
veil: ‘‘ Every breath of air and ray of light and 
heat, every beautiful prospect is, as it were, the 
skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes 
of those whose faces see God.” It is obvious how 
medieval is all this rather than Greek; how it runs 
into symbolism while making light of portraiture 
for its own sake; and how unlike the character- 
sketching which was a favourite device with Bour- 
daloue and other French orators. 

We may also read the Sermons as soliloquies on 
the events of the day by which Newman was urged 
along towards an unsuspected goal. ‘They cry out 
against the whole Liberal advance. ‘They pierce 


THE TRACTARIANS 47 


with irony the religion of which Mozley declares 
that it made young Evangelicals “ clever men of 
the world.” They lay on the dissecting-table that 
peculiar English creation, Pharisaic and Philistine, 
which foreigners call hypocrisy, not knowing 
what else to make of it. Savonarola brought Flor- 
ence to the “‘ Burning of the Vanities’; Newman 
would have introduced into the popular religion 
ideas, ‘first principles in Scripture,’ concerning 
poverty and self-denial, which it loathed. ‘True, 
he did not dream, then or afterwards, of convert- 
ing “the world’’; his judgment of its followers, 
their grace, refinement, courtesy, even their natural 
affection, was Maccabean in its severity. But, 
standing aloof, he sees the Dance of Death as in 
some Orcagna-fresco, and no prophet has flung 
over its many-twinkling radiances a gloom more 
intense. 

Living like a simple undergraduate in his shabby 
rooms at Oriel, entrusted with a congregation 
which was composed of a few shopkeepers and 
their households, Newman called these remarkable 
deliverances Parochial Sermons; nor would he 
print them until 1834, some time after the move- 
ment had got under weigh. Their success was 
great and lasting. ‘‘ They beat all other sermons 
out of the market,” it was said, ‘‘ as Scott’s novels 
all other story-books.”” So well, indeed, have they 


48 NEWMAN 


succeeded in giving a tone to preachers that we 
cannot measure their effect who are accustomed 
to look for sincerity, direct speaking, and an air, 
at least, of self-forgetfulness in the Gospel-mes- 
senger. 

But did they touch the nation’s heart? Neither 
then nor since, if we may argue from the course 
of events. Newman was advocating, in language 
as untechnical as he could make it, a return to the 
“Church of the Fathers,” and the Fathers were 
monks, or champions of dogma, unknown except 
as idle legendmongers, fiercely orthodox, writing 
bad Greek and worse Latin, addicted to fasting, 
celibacy, and superstition. Milton’s contemptuous 
phrase about them represented English thought 
on the subject in 1830, and would have been echoed 
by the impenitent Lord Brougham twenty years 
later. Nay, in 1856, we find Macaulay writing 
that ‘The Free Inquiry is Middleton’s master- 
piece. He settled the authority of the Fathers for 
ever with all reasonable men,” i.e. showed it to be 
none at all. Church history had fallen into neg- 
lect. ‘Our popular religion,’ said Newman, 
“hardly recognises the twelve long ages which lie 
between the Councils of Nicaea and Trent’; Gib- 
bon was the chief, perhaps the only English writer 
who had any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical 
historian. From the New Testament to the Ref- 


THE TRACTARIANS 49 


ormation fancy sprang at a bound, leaving Primi- 
tive Christianity and its successor the Medieval 
in a chaos unexplored beneath. But, Newman 
argued, could there be a more violent assumption 
than that the religion which transformed Europe 
was merely a sentiment, not a fact? And if a fact, 
or rather an unbroken, ever-growing series of facts, 
could it not be ascertained and located as other 
facts? ‘The first duty, then, was to bring before a 
careless generation those very Fathers, their lives 
and their writings, whom Protestants scorned be- 
cause they did not know them. 

This was in large measure done. Pusey edited 
the Library of the Fathers, a vast enterprise, the 
relics of which encumber secondhand bookstalls 
at this day. Later on the Catena Aurea of St. 
Thomas Aquinas, which embodies a world of 
Patristic commentaries on the Gospels, was trans- 
lated. Newman’s last undertaking as an Anglican, 
the Lives of English Saints, carries down the story 
to medieval times. But we must not look for criti- 
cism either of text or thought, applied to literature 
so unequal, multifarious, and yet characteristic, in 
Oxford men who were slenderly equipped to deal 
with such recondite problems. It is Germany— 
the patient, shall we say the “ golden ass” of 
Apuleius ?—to which we are indebted for critical 
recensions and surveys, not yet completed, of the 


50 NEWMAN 


first Christian centuries. Nevertheless, what New- 
man himself undertook, though fragmentary, 
abides; it has not only the charm of a style that 
was ever gaining in ease and elegance, but insight, 
reality, and life as well. He has bequeathed to 
posterity sketches, not a monument so much as a 
gallery of studies; but they proclaim the great 
writer, the possibly first-rate historian that he 
might have been. 

It is no exaggeration to say that, by these efforts 
and all they led after them, Newman enabled the 
English people to recover their Christian pedigree. 
Names which had ceased even to be memories re- 
vived. Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, 
Theodoret, and Chrysostom, became living per- 
sonages, under a treatment which, though tender, 
was not sentimental, and if it showed a reverence 
that Gibbon would have smiled at, was quite as 
considerate of the facts as his own, and occasionally 
more so. The little volume entitled Church of the 
Fathers is perfect in its way; the style strong and 
persuasive, the drawing firm, the atmosphere 
steeped in a knowledge of times and localities 
which was yet to be acquired when its author com- 
posed his book on the Arians. Beginning with 
Greece and Asia Minor, visiting in succession 
Egypt, Africa, Spain, and Gaul, it illustrates as if 
“a drama in three acts,” that marvellous fourth 


THE TRACTARIANS Pay 


century which beheld the Roman Empire turn 
Christian, the triumph and overthrow of Arianism, 
the descent upon East and West of our ancestors 
from the North. 

In this and the. following period—speaking 
loosely, from St. Cyprian to the Council of Chal- 
cedon—Newman lived as at home; he read its 
documents, selected choice pages from it, to dress 
up in his incomparable English, took its Church 
heroes for his pattern, and found in its crises of 
dogma situations parallel to our own which for 
him decided the issue. Here again we remark 
how by means of subtle coincidences, overlooked 
in previous controversy on both sides, he gave to 
his life an interest such as he ascribes to the history 
that so wrought upon him. ‘ The shadow of the 
fifth century was on the sixteenth,” and on the 
nineteenth no less—‘‘ like a spirit rising from the 
troubled waters of the old world with the shape 
and lineaments of the new.” But in thus reason- 
ing who could be more modern? With Newman 
the religious genius turned back in quest of con- 
tinuity, as did the historical with Layard, excavat- 
ing the palaces at Nineveh, or with Champollion 
deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was the 
method of Lyell, and soon would be the task of 
Darwin, to build up rocks, plants, animals, and the 
human races themselves, into a record that should 


52 NEWMAN 


leave no gaps, connect the present with the past, 
and in both discern a law at once of identity and 
progress. The day when “separate creations ” 
should no longer be accepted was dawning. 

Newman perceived that there can be no such 
thing as ancient history which is not modern, or 
modern which is not ancient. He caught sight of 
a principle, as far-reaching as elementary, in virtue 
of which the Christian religion, organic because 
it is objective, stands outside the conscience of in- 
dividuals, allows of its being handled as scientific 
men handle their subject-matters, and will yield 
results on this plan which when stated are capable 
of verification. ‘The mystic void of Evangelical 
sentiment was, therefore, to be filled up; history 
afforded a ground to move upon; out of the cloud 
we might come to the city of saints and martyrs. 
But how did views of which the note was unity 
agree with that violent break at the Reformation, 
so complete as to have made the Church itself an 
island, cut off from the rest of the world? What 
did the Thirty-nine Articles say? 

‘““Now the least universal institution in Eu- 
rope,” it has been remarked, “ is the Church of 
England, and the most universal is the Church 
of Rome.” Yet Englishmen, if they tyrannized 
over their Church in Acts of Parliament, were 
hardly disposed to look on unconcerned while a 


THE TRACTARIANS 53 


knot of enthusiasts in Oxford, professing that they 
kept the middle way, were approaching nearer 
and nearer to the Roman extreme. ‘“ Tendimus 
in Latium,” which some Oxonians called out as a 
challenge, provoked countercries of ‘‘ No Popery.”’ 
The assault which Newman’s friends led in 1836 
against Hampden, though few or none had read 
the Bampton Lectures they so loudly condemned, 
was sure to be answered with fresh violence; “ the 
wheel would come full circle.” But in 1839 New- 
man’s position was at its height. He preached, 
lectured, wrote, and talked incessantly. The re- 
sources of his heart and intellect seemed inexhaust- 
ible. Like Socrates, he was willing to argue with 
anyone who would venture on an assumption; but 
his logic was at the service of a creed, and none 
who lived intimately with him then would have 
thought of calling him sceptical. 

“Theld a large bold system of religion,” he says, 
“very unlike the Protestantism of the day, but it 
was the concentration and adjustment of the state- 
ments of great Anglican authorities.’ So he be- 
lieved when putting forth his Via Media, which 
despite some fine passages is not now readable; 
and the Essay on Justification is a similar but much 
more pleasing attempt to reconcile opposing 
schools. 

In the latter volume an extraordinary clearness 


54 NEWMAN 


of spiritual light seems to fall from the sky; per- 
haps the four or five pages in Lecture XI which 
account for the success of Christian preaching are 
more effective, as they are more concentrated than 
the long chapter on that subject which concludes 
the Grammar of Assent. Certainly they give us 
the author’s own philosophy. ‘“‘ The Apostles,” 
he says, “‘ appealed to men’s hearts, and, according 
to their hearts, so they answered them.” Faith, as 
a principle of knowledge, could not be analyzed; 
it was secret, inexplicable, and spontaneous, higher 
than the senses or the reason, using arguments 
“but as outward forms of something beyond argu- 
ment.” Faith ‘‘ enjoined the law of love for re- 
taliation; it put pain above enjoyment; it sup- 
planted polygamy by the celibate; it honoured 
poverty before affluence, the communion of Saints 
before the civil power, the next world before this.” 
Compare such “ evidences of Christianity’ with 
Paley’s, then the text in both Universities, and it 
will be felt that revolution was in the air. Heads 
of houses might well be alarmed. But a succes- 
sion of startling events, to which that generation 
had not the key, was preparing, with the result 
that Newman and his transcendent logic would be 
driven from Oxford. 

Since 1836 he had been solitary in his own 
thoughts. Froude was gone. ‘‘ Ah dearest!” 


THE TRACTARIANS 55 


cries the bereaved friend, passionate beyond his 
wont— 


Ah dearest! with a word he could dispel 

All questioning, and raise 

Our hearts to rapture, whispering all was well 
And turning prayer to praise. 

And other secrets too he could declare, 

By patterns all divine, 

His earthly creed retouching here and there, 
And deepening every line. 


When preaching on the “‘ greatness and littleness 


of human life,” he refers secretly to this lofty spirit 
as among the men who, “ by such passing flashes, 
like rays of the sun, and the darting lightning, give 
tokens of their immortality . . . that they are 
‘but angels in disguise.” And elsewhere, “ they 
are taken away for some purpose surely; their gifts 
are not lost to us; their soaring minds, the fire of 
their contemplations, the sanctity of their desires, 
the vigour of their faith, the sweetness and gentle- 
ness of their affections, were not given without an 
object.”’ 

Newman’s friendships were numerous and ro- 
mantic; he had indeed ‘‘a temper imperious and 
wilful, but along with it a most attaching gentle- 
ness, sweetness, singleness of heart and purpose.” 
These are words of Anthony Froude, who de- 


56 NEWMAN 


scribes him as he might be seen in those critical 
years. ‘‘ His appearance was striking. He was 
above the middle height, slight and spare. His 
head was large, his face remarkably like that of 
Julius Caesar. The forehead, the shape of the 
ears and the nose, were almost the same. The 
lines of the mouth were very peculiar, and I should 
say exactly the same. I have often thought of the 
resemblance, and believe that it extended to the 
temperament.” Down to extreme old age the 
likeness was marked, and then as always Newman 
‘‘ attracted the passionate devotion of friends and 
followers.” 

But he paid the penalty of original genius in 
a deepening solitude; as he observes with a sigh, 
“St. John had to live in his own thoughts.” After 
Hurrell Froude his correspondents are his disci- 
ples; he must give out rather than take in; the 
strange spiritual conflict which filled his years from 
the autumn of 1839 to the last sermon at Little- 
more on September 25, 1843, goes forward almost 
without witnesses. For even those, like F. Rogers 
or H. Wilberforce, who stood nearest his heart, 
did not really know it. Another has asked whether 
he knew it himself. Here, then, was a situation, 
tragic in itself, but made still more affecting by 
the strength of the motives opposed, the unique 
personality of the hero, and the uncertain issue, 


Cardinal Newman. 


After the miniature painted by W..C. Ross in the possession of 
Mr. Henry Huks Gibbs. Portrait now at 
Keble College, Oxford 


THE TRACTARIANS 57° 


doubtful up to the moment which decided all. Out 
of such elements is great literature bred. 

And the hero has given us the tragedy in his 
Apologia, which will ever be to English readers 
what Rousseau’s Confessions are to the French 
and St. Augustine’s to all the world—a portrait of 
himself drawn by the artist in such taking colours 
that every other pales before it. The prologue 
is admirable— 

“For who can know himself?” cries Newman, 
“and the multitude of subtle influences which act 
upon him; and who can recollect, at the distance 
of twenty-five years, all that he once knew about 
his thoughts and his deeds, and that during a por- 
tion of his life when even at the time his observa- 
tion, whether of himself or of the external world, 
was less than before or after, by very reason of 
the perplexity and dismay which weighed upon 
him—when, though it would be most unthankful 
to seem to imply that he had not all-sufficient light 
amid his darkness, yet a darkness emphatically it 
was? And who can gird himself suddenly to a 
new and anxious undertaking, which he might in- 
deed be able to perform well, had he full and calm 
leisure to look through everything that he has 
written? but, on the other hand, as to that calm 
contemplation of the past, in itself so desirable, 
who can afford to be leisurely and deliberate while 


58 NEWMAN 


he practises on himself a cruel operation, the rip- 
ping up of old griefs, and the venturing again 
upon the ‘infandum dolorem’ of years, in which 
the stars of this lower heaven were one by one 
going out? I could not in cool blood, nor except 
upon the imperious call of duty, attempt what I 
have set myself to do.” 

As he goes on to tell the story, it is full of 
strange coincidences, accidents which turn out to 
have a purpose, even grotesque encounters like that 
with the Jerusalem bishopric, and what De Quin- 
cey terms “‘ echo auguries,” by which one sentence 
does the work of years and volumes. The cham- 
pion of Anglicanism wounds himself with his own 
sword. His trembling devotion to truth, sensitive 
as a lover’s passion, ends in the noblest retractation 
which has ever been put on record. The genial 
Wiseman, somewhat of the Spanish grandee about 
him, arguing on well-worn lines, had quoted in 
defence of Catholic unity from St. Augustine, 
“Securus judicat orbis terrarum ’’—Anglicans, 
similar to the old Donatists of Africa, being di- 
vided from the Church (Ecumenical, must be in 
the wrong. The words kept ringing in Newman’s 
ears like the “ Turn again, Whittington,” of the 
chime, or like the “‘ Tolle, lege—tolle, lege,” of 
the child which converted Augustine himself. “ By 
those great words of the ancient Father, the theory 
of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized.” 


THE TRACTARIANS 59 


But the listener had brought to them an im- 
agination already expectant. His summer reading, 
in that year 1839, which he considered to be his 
zenith as an Anglican teacher, was about dead 
heretics like Eutyches, remote and subtle wrang- 
lers, like the Monophysites of A.D. 450, and the 
Council of Chalcedon. It had shown him a Pope 
who was simply in the right, the majestic St. Leo, 
stretching his rod over East and West, dictating 
a creed, and saving Christianity. To this visible 
scene Augustine’s axiom served as an interpreta- 
tion and an approval. It was a “ divine call,” and 
Newman, in St. Mary’s pulpit, asked himself, 
“What gain is it to be applauded, admired, 
courted, followed—compared with this one aim, 
of ‘not being disobedient to a heavenly vision’? ”’ 
The heavens had opened and closed again. But 
“he who has seen a ghost cannot be as if he had 
never seen it.” 

The “ advocatus diaboli’’—as we have termed 
that strenuous critic of Newman, Dr. Abbott— 
here draws a happy allusion from Hamlet, uncer- 
tain whether his preternatural visitant was of 
heaven or the abyss. Almost in those words New- 
man shaped his own doubts. He gave up his 
“positive Anglican theory,” but he would not go 
to Rome. He fell back on his early arguments 
and the belief that ruling over the Eternal City 


60 NEWMAN 


¢ 


was a ‘‘ genius loci,’ the ‘‘ old dethroned Pagan 
monster still living, that was Antichrist.” It 
availed nothing. Rome, as a Church, was the 
standard of doctrine, and to satisfy impatient fol- 
lowers he undertook the task of showing in Tract 
Ninety that the Articles could not have condemned 
the Council of Trent. 

Straightway he was denounced on all hands; 
England blazed into Protestant fury; the Tract 
was censured as an “evasion’’ at Oxford; the 
““ Movement,” hitherto prosperous beyond hope, 
was broken in two. One wing advanced towards 
Rome; the other halted, wavered for a time, then 
split up into sections. The main body, held to- 
gether by Pusey and Keble, stood staunch to the 
Church of England; but they had lost their leader. 
Anthony Froude, though never exactly a Tracta- 
rian, took refuge with Carlyle. The most intel- 
lectual of Newman’s younger disciples, Ward, 
came out with his [deal of the Christian Church, 
was ‘‘ degraded” in solemn session, all Oxford 
looking on, and carried into the Roman schools a 
power of pure metaphysics which brought Stuart 
Mill to his knees and shattered the materialist 
dogma called the ‘‘ association of ideas.” Mark 
Pattison became a ‘“‘ Liberal,” fiercely intolerant 
wherever he touched on Catholic topics, but the 
one solitary mind, it appears to us, which by its 


THE TRACTARIANS 61 


keen insight, feeling for the great in literature 
ancient as well as modern, fastidious scholarship, 
and detachment from the idols of the market place, 
might in some degree have done for Newman’s 
later life what Hurrell Froude did for its less 
mature period. Pattison had his full share of the 
spirit of the age. Could the master have subdued 
him permanently, Oxford and England would not 
be where we see them to-day, in a languor of ag- 
nostic doubt fevered over with a craze for enjoy- 
ment and the money that will purchase it. For 
Pattison was, pre-eminently, the modern man. 

Tract Ninety, though a landmark in Church 
history, is not literature. When the author had 
defined his Thirty-Nine Articles as “ the stammer- 
ing lips of ambiguous formulas,”: there was really 
no need to enter upon details; his work as an Angli- 
can was done. He discontinued the Tracts by-and- 
by, retreated to Littlemore, buried himself in his 
library, and gave up his living. The interest of 
the play now moves round a single figure: not what 
the Church or University will do, but what will 
Newman do? He is ever the hesitating Dane, a 
prey to shadows, waiting for the omen which is 
to decide. Hamlet, however, scarcely believed in 
Providence, though he appeals to it; of Newman 
it would not be “‘ more than an hyperbole ” to say 
that he believed in nothing else. 


62 NEWMAN 


His Sermons on Subjects of the Day, preached 
during this agony of indecision, are in a mingled 
strain. To read them as they were delivered, is to 
overhear the soliloquy in which every possible 
reason is advanced against joining the Church of 
Rome that could yet afford ground to one whose 
ideals were monastic, antiquarian, but above all, 
unworldly. On this point Newman never changed. 
When he contrasts ‘‘ Faith and the World,” as ene- 
mies which cannot come to terms, he is laying down 
principles that we shall find in his discourse at 
Rome thirty-seven years afterwards; he is denounc- 
ing the ‘‘ Liberal,” or, as we should now say, the 
secularist view of society which takes no account 
of religion because any “‘ other world” is to it an 
open question. His last apology for the English 
Establishment brought no comfort to himself or 
his little flock, ‘‘ We could not be as if we never 
had been a Church; we were Samaria.” ‘That 
idea faded from his mind. ‘“‘ New creeds, private 
opinions, self-devised practices, are delusions,” he 
Was very soon writing, and “the division of 
Churches is the corruption of hearts.” He might 
be lingering on the threshold, but his face was 
set towards exile. In his own language, ‘‘ From 
the end of 1841 I was on my death-bed, as regards 
my membership of the Anglican Church.” 

Among the correspondence of this interval, 


THE TRACTARIANS 63 


which lasted nearly four years, the letters ex- 
changed with his sister Jemima, Mrs. John Moz- 
ley, are equal to the finest passages, whether of 
the sermons or the Apologia. They should be 
gone over side by side with Ernest Renan’s to his 
sister Henrietta, which cover the same period, but 
end in a determination precisely the reverse of 
Newman’s. And Henrietta encourages, rebukes, 
draws her young brother forward to a goal she 
has herself reached; while the English lady can but 
plead for delay, or break out in tender expostula- 
tion with a spirit she reveres. 

Both series of letters have upon them the stamp 
of high refinement, in diction as in feeling; they 
belong to the great things in epistolary literature. 
The purity of style is perhaps not less in one than 
in the other; it is French or English written not 
for effect, but to express the very heart of those 
who were debating an irrevocable issue. Matthew 
Arnold would call it “‘ prose of the centre,’ and 
undoubtedly it is classic as though by definition. 
Too long to quote here, the letters of November 
and December, 1844, and still more those of 
March, 1845, when Newman was giving up his 
Oriel Fellowship, have in them strokes of pathos, 
with a stern yet suppressed energy of conviction 
beneath, which are piercing as we read, and we 
are but strangers. We cannot recall any English 


64 NEWMAN 


correspondence quite like this, but if a parallel 
should be found in Cowper, the beloved and un- 
happy enthusiast, it will be sufficient praise. 

By October 9, 1845, Renan had arrived in 
Paris, bade farewell to St. Sulpice, and putting 
off his clerical habit, gone out of the Catholic 
Church. On that day John Henry Newman was 
received into it at Littlemore, by Father Dominic, 
an Italian Passionist friar. History, which has 
marked the coincidence, will register its conse- 
quences for a long while to come. 

The manuscript of his Development lay unfin- 
ished on the table, where he had worked standing 
over it sometimes fourteen hours a day. Newman 
took a pen and wrote the conclusion of the whole 
matter in an immortal page— 

‘““Such were the thoughts concerning the 
‘Blessed Vision of Peace,’ of one whose long-con- 
tinued petition had been that the Most Merciful 
would not despise the work of His own hands, 
nor leave him to himself; while yet his eyes were 
dim, and his breast laden, and he could but em- 
ploy Reason in the things of Faith. And now, 
dear Reader, time is short, eternity is long. Put 
not from you what you have here found; regard 
it not as mere matter of present controversy; set 
not out resolved to refute it, and looking about 
for the best way of doing so; seduce not yourself 


THE TRACTARIANS 65 


with the imagination that it comes of disappoint- 
ment, or disgust, or restlessness, or wounded feel- 
ing, or undue sensibility, or other weakness. 
Wrap not yourself round in the associations of 
years past; nor determine that to be truth which 
you wish to be so, nor make an idol of cherished 
anticipations. ‘Time is short, eternity is long. 


Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine; 
Secundum verbum tuum in pace, 
Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum.”’ 


CHAPTER III 
FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 


NEWMAN, in a deeply felt passage of Loss and 
Gain, makes his ‘other self,” Charles Reding,’ 
say: ‘‘ Yes, I give up home, I give up all who 
have ever known me, loved me, valued me, wished 
me well; I know well I am making myself a by- 
word and an outcast.” It wastrue. The people 
of England, its princes, priests, and prophets, 
‘““ Lords and Commons, Universities, Ecclesiastical 
Courts, marts of commerce, great towns, country 
parishes,” had dealt with him and his doctrine as 
they would have dealt with St. Athanasius. And 
more also. ‘Thanks to the imprudent talk about 
“reserve ’”’ in matters of religion, but above all to 
the lawyer-like ingenuities of Tract Ninety, many 
were convinced that he had been a traitor in the 
service of Rome, undermining the Establishment. 
Not one of his relatives would follow him; Francis 
Newman gave up the idea of Revelation, the two 
Mozleys drifted into Liberal waters. So com- 
pletely had the great teacher broken with his past, 
that he “thought of betaking himself to some 

66 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 67 


secular calling.” He had given up his sword to 
Wiseman with a saintly meekness. It was restored 
to him on fresh terms; he went down to the battle 
again, and his later campaigns were as full of 
surprises and vicissitudes as his first, but they ended 
in victory. 

Whatever comes of it, the Church of England 
owes to Newman its revived influence and its pres- 
ent form. ‘‘ Mysteries which had been dismissed 
as superstitions at the Reformation,” says Anthony 
Froude, ‘“‘ and had never since been heard of, were 
preached again by half the clergy, and had revolu- 
tionized the ritual in our churches. Every county 
had its Anglican monasteries and convents.” 
“The State Church,” adds T. H. Huxley, ‘‘ seems 
more and more anxious to repudiate all complicity 
with the principles of the Protestant Reformation. 
and to call itself Anglo-Catholic.” 

But where was the man who had wrought these 
changes? In retreat at Maryvale, an old disused 
Catholic college in Warwickshire, lonely as he had 
been at Littlemore. Ora simple student in Rome 
at Santa Croce, looking out on the Campagna 
which he had traversed with such different feelings 
fifteen years previously. Or wearing the habit of 
St. Philip Neri, a Florentine who was brought up 
near San Marco, who is called the ‘‘ Apostle of 
Rome,” and who in his Oratory of the Chiesa 


68 NEWMAN 


Nuova had combined music, literature, divinity, 
and the common life, in a home which was not a 
cloister, under a Rule without vows, as of secular 
priests who should have inherited the large and 
calm spirit of the Benedictines. But whether in 
Papal Rome or Protestant Birmingham, he led 
a life apart, as he had done in Oxford. 

To the England which cast him out Newman 
was dead until 1864, when he published the appeal 
that won all hearts. Yet his contributions to phi- 
losophy and letters during this banishment are, in 
point of style, equal, if not superior, to his former 
writings; in breadth, liveliness, and sparkle they 
betoken an advance of power, and they address a 
wider audience. If such a thing there be as a 
world-literature, they may claim no undistinguished 
place in that Temple of Fame. Newman’s prose 
had gained in suppleness; :t could be playful and 
sarcastic; it lent itself to parable; it touched keys 
that hitherto had been silent. It was always that 
of a profoundly religious mind; but Horace or 
Addison would have admired in it the man deli- 
cately observant, with a keen sense of the ridicu- 
lous, and of the finest wit, who delighted in Thack- 
eray and Jane Austen, who composed choice Latin 
prologues for the acting of Terence’s ‘‘ Comedies,” 
who desired that learning should be culture, and 
the scholar a gentleman, and study an introduction 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 69 


to the art of life. To read these beautiful and 
serene pages—the University Lectures, the His- 
torical Sketches, Callista, and the Occasional Ser- 
mons, is a liberal education. 

However, we must retrace our steps to the De- 
velopment, which is in so many respects the ‘‘ opus 
magnum,” or masterpiece, of a long career. One 
critic describes it as written in a fever-dream; Mr. 
Wilfrid Ward dwells on its ‘‘ crowded thoughts 
and vivid imagination,” and quotes Newman’s 
associates as witnessing to the “ extreme mental 
tension’ under which it was composed. Its im- 
mediate hearings may be thus indicated. When 
Luther broke away from Rome, he appealed to 
Holy Scripture as all-sufficient for those who were 
called, and Christianity became the “ religion of a 
book ’—the Bible and the Bible only. But, in 
Laud’s view, which was the Anglican, to interpret 
the Bible we must go by tradition or the rule of St. 
Vincent of Lerins, ‘‘ That is the Christian faith 
which has been taught always, everywhere, and by 
all.” Newman, however, on searching into the. 
Arian and other controversies, found that the rule 
could not be simply applied. Antiquity did not 
present the scene of undivided and, as it were, 
mechanical agreement which Anglicans took for 
granted. Chillingworth had written of Popes 
against Popes and Councils against Councils. 


70 NEWMAN 


Petavius, a great Jesuit theologian contemporary 
with Bossuet, had allowed that there were, in a 
certain sense, Fathers against Fathers. And Bull, 
in his Defence of the Nicene Creed, did but open 
a larger question, viz., what was the law upon 
which Christianity, assuming it to be the divine 
revelation, proceeded? 

Such was the problem, to which Newman an- 
swered that ‘“‘ whereas Revelation is a heavenly 
gift, He who gave it virtually has not given it, 
unless He has also secured it from perversion or 
corruption, in all such development as comes upon 
it by the necessity of its nature,”’ in other words, 
“that intellectual action through successive gen- 
erations which is the organ of development must 
be in its determinations infallible.” This was the 
Roman position. 

Development, or evolution, was however neces- 
sary from the nature of the case. Not the letter 
of the New Testament, nor any assignable number 
of books, would ‘‘ comprise a delineation of all pos- 
sible forms which a divine message will assume 
when submitted to a multitude of minds.” “ The 
more claims an idea has to be considered living, 
the more various will be its aspects; and the more 
social and political is its nature, the more compli- 
cated and subtle will be its issues, and the longer 
and more eventful its course.” And so the whole 


“URUIMON [PUIPseED Aq papuNnoys 
WeEYAUIUIIIG ‘UOJseqspy *proy Ao[seH ‘IWAN AI[lItd “1g JO Art0JeIOQ PUL simaT “L &9 904d 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 71 


Bible is written on the principle of development. 
“Can any history wear a more human appearance 
than that of the rise and growth of the chosen 
people?’ As with the Bible, so with Creed and 
Church. ‘“ No one doctrine ”—we might add, no 
one institution—‘‘ can be named which starts com- 
plete at first, and gains nothing afterwards from 
the investigations of faith and the attacks of 
heresy.”’ All parties do, in fact, develop the Chris- 
tian ideas in their own way, and a mere identical 
transcript, as of type committed to paper, is as in- 
consistent with the laws of our intellect as with 
the vastness and depth of what is offered us, and 
its defence and propagation in a world of strife. 
“There can be no combination on the basis of 
truth without an organ of truth.” The correlative 
of a revealed system is an infallible authority. If, 
then, the Christian be a social religion, resting on 
ideas acknowledged as divine, and if those ideas 
make distinct impressions on different minds, and 
issue in developments, true, or false, or mixed, 
“what power will suffice to meet and do justice to 
these conflicting conditions, but a supreme author- 
ity ruling and reconciling individual judgments by 
a divine right? ” 

Apart from his solution of the problem raised, 
Newman, by exhibiting Christianity as a living 
system, incarnate in the millions, comprehending 


rae NEWMAN 


centuries, touching at all points the concerns of 
nations and holding up to them its own type of 
civilisation, had sketched the indispensable pro- 
logue to every future Church history, greatly en- 
larged the scheme of Evidences, swept aside a priori 
reasonings as to what it was or should be, and 
brought men out of the clouds that they might 
learn from the facts themselves how to judge of 
its merits. He was well aware that in England 
people regarded doctrine and usage, antiquity and 
development, as so much lumber, the débris which 
had floated down from the ‘“‘ Dark Ages.” But 
this contempt for the whole was, in the eyes of a 
sincere believer, a witness to the whole; since 
other developments than these from Nicaea to 
Trent there were none. All the heresies were 
short-lived: Luther and Calvin had seen their 
day; were not their disciples running out into 
sheer unbelief, or carrying to its legitimate term 
the Pantheism which lay hidden in their princi- 
ples? 

But the Reformers had cast away medieval de- 
velopments on the ground of their being corrup- 
tions; how bring the inquiry to a touchstone? 
Newman proposed seven tests—preservation of 
type, continuity of principles, power of assimila- 
tion, logical sequence, anticipation of the future, 
conservative action on the past, and chronic vigour. 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 73 


Nearly one hundred and twenty pages are taken 
up in depicting “the wonderful identity of type 
which characterizes the Catholic Church from first 
to last.” Yet the subject is by no means exhausted. 
“It is confessed on all hands ’—such was the con- 
clusion—“ that from the time of Constantine the 
system and the phenomena of worship in Christen- 
dom, from Moscow to Spain, and from Ireland to 
Chili, is one and the same.’ This was termed the 
“analogy of Faith.” 

Newman’s wide and careful reading in the early 
centuries, his classical scholarship, and his quick 
eye for likenesses between things far apart, en- 
abled him to draw a series of comparisons in which 
the modern Roman Church recalls the ancient or 
primitive, with a rhetorical effect seldom surpassed. 
He shows, too, with convincing logic, how every 
part of the system supposes or leads on to every 
other; each is successively means and end; in short, 
if the type is organic, it is likewise unique, all its 
elements obeying a sovereign law of assimilation. 
But, magnificent as are these large historical land- 
scapes, we cannot reproduce them here. Certainly 
Gibbon would have read with pleasure and no 
grudging assent the forty pages in which New- 
man sums up the view of Christianity taken by the 
Roman Empire, its statesmen, historians, poets, 
and philosophers, as equally applicable to the Ro- 


74 NEWMAN 


man Church. It is a brilliant and suggestive par- 
allel, of which the moral is thus pointed :— 

‘There is a religious communion, claiming a 
divine commission, and holding all other religious 
bodies around it heretical or infidel; it is a well- 
organized, well-disciplined body; it is a sort of 
secret society, binding together its members by in- 
fluences and by engagements which it is difficult 
for strangers to ascertain. It is spread over the 
known world; it may be weak or insignificant 
locally, but it is strong on the whole from its con- 
tinuity; it may be smaller than all other religious 
bodies together, but is larger than each separately. 
It is a natural enemy to governments external to 
itself; it is intolerant and engrossing, and tends to 
a new modelling of society; it breaks laws, it 
divides families. It is a gross superstition; it is 
charged with the foulest crimes; it is despised by 
the intellect of the day; it is frightful to the 
imagination of the many. And there is but one 
communion such. Place this description before 
Pliny or Julian; place it before Frederick the 
Second or Guizot. ‘ Apparent dirae facies.’ Each 
knows at once, without asking a question, who is 
meant by it. One object, and only one, absorbs 
each item of the delineation.” 

As if to set the seal on this claim to identity, 
the book had not long been published when Eng- 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD Hie 


land went into a frenzy over the “‘ Papal Aggres- 
sion.” Lord John Russell brought in his Bill 
against Roman Catholics, but he confounded in one 
charge with them the Laudian party; in a word, he 
granted Newman’s argument, “ either accept the 
whole or reject the whole.” This gave occasion 
to the raciest and least difficult of Newman’s 
“Lectures ’—those delivered in the Corn Ex- 
change, Birmingham, on The Present Position of 
Catholics in England. ‘ They are full of clever 
satire and description,’ wrote George Eliot, who 
read them with great amusement. The humour in 
which they abounded was really kindness; and the 
hypothetical Russian who misunderstood Black- 
stone as John Bull did his suffering Catholic neigh- 
bours, or the “‘ Prejudiced Man ” who went abroad 
to see idolatry and superstition everywhere, and the 
Scripture-reader who thought the service known 
as Benediction a specious kind of juggling, were 
true pictures, at which the fiery Tertullian would 
have smiled. Nevertheless, in spite of their 
energy, grace, and wit, not a single newspaper 
quoted or alluded to them. Yet they will be the 
sole record possessing literary worth of an epi- 
sode which rivalled the outburst on occasion of 
Tract Ninety, and which ended as suddenly as it 
began. 

Cardinal Wiseman, the storm being over, called 


76 NEWMAN 


his new hierarchy together in synod, at Oscott, on 
July 13, 1852. The great Tractarian leader 
preached. His sermon, called “The Second 
Spring,” marks in literature a moment of the 
Romantic triumph, not less memorable than 
-Chateaubriand’s appearance with the Génie du 
Christianisme in his hand. It should be compared 
with Newman’s farewell to the Anglican Estab- 
lishment—that “‘ Parting of Friends ”’ in which he 
exclaims, ‘“O my Mother! whence is this unto 
thee, that thou hast good things poured upon thee 
and canst not keep them, and bearest children, yet 
darest not own them? . . . How is it that 
whatever is generous in purpose, and tender or 
deep in devotion, thy flower and thy promise, falls 
from thy bosom and finds no home within thine 
arms?’ His lament is now changed to an almost 
lyrical note, ‘‘ The past has returned the dead lives. 

The English Church was, and the English 
Church was not, and the English Church is once 
again. This is the portent, worthy of acry. It is 
the coming in of a second spring.” : 

The preacher was himself its harbinger, still 
meditating on man’s mortality, on the winter that 
overtakes him and all he does; but rapt into a 
vision of the second temple rising above the ruins 
of the old. Firm, sensitive, and thrilling with an 
emotion which runs along all its harmonies, the 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 7 


composition is a poem, to be judged by its corre- 
spondence with a scene in history which could not 
be acted over again. It is said that Macaulay 
knew the sermon by heart. And a striking testi- 
mony to the inevitable grace of Newman’s periods 
was borne by others, not much conversant with 
books, who, after reading him once, felt as if they 
had always known what he set before them. Per- 
haps the explanation is that, however fresh or re- 
condite his thoughts, he, like Walter Scott, attired 
them in the natural yet not commonplace terms of 
the current language. He never could be quaint, 
odd, or affected; he went up to the heights as by 
steps that were visible to all. If, on certain sub- 
jects, he remained obscure, even to himself, as he 
confesses in a charming letter of his old age, the 
reason cannot be found in his choice of words, but 
lies below them. 

Thus he is the opposite of Carlyle, whose vo- 
cabulary we learn as though a foreign tongue, 
which in fact it is, made harder stil! by what John- 
son would term its “‘ anfractuosities ’—a prophet’s 
dialect, not the medium by which men in the street 
talk to one another. Newman’s, on the contrary, 
is common English made perfect. To it we may 
apply what Ernest Renan was taught as the secret 
of good writing by his sister. ‘She convinced me,” 
he says, “‘ that everything may be said in the sim- 


78 NEWMAN 


ple and correct style of our best authors, and that 
novel expressions and violent* images are due to 
pretension misplaced, or to ignorance of our real 
treasures.” A hard judgment on modern French 
literature! 

Without laying down rules of court for genius 
—which will be severely unadorned or will pour 
out its magnificence by an instinct far surer than 
general prescriptions—we perceive that Newman 
held the elementary idea of a classic author to be 
this freedom from pretence. Though individual 
sermons often bear titles which are poems, as 
“The Ventures of Faith,” ‘‘ The Church a Home 
for the Lonely,” and many more, he would not 
advertise his volumes by glittering names; they 
come before us with inscriptions as prosaic as can 
be devised. What should we anticipate from a 
work called ‘‘ Sermons to Mixed Congregations ’’? 
Dreary polemics, or expostulation in the nature of 
those tracts which we see lying about in railroad 
waiting-rooms? It turns out to be perhaps the 
most powerful pleading of its kind for religion that 
our language contains. The inward fire has 
reached to the surface; it glows with conviction; 
argument, imagery, example, shine translucent in a 
prophetic atmosphere, solemn as that of the Sis- 
tine, with a Last Judgment hanging in our sight, 
fixed there for ever. This was Newman’s nearest 


BIRST. - CATHOLIC. PERIOD 79 


approach to the pictured style, though always sym- 
bolic; as Wordsworth says— 


All things, responsive to the writing, there 
Breathed immortality, revolving life, 
And greatness still revolving. 


But it was a life which had in it fearful possibili- 
ties, an immortality not of bliss only, but of pain. 
Exchange this grave melodious prose for lines and 
stanzas more concentrated, not more earnest, you 
will be hearing the Dream of Gerontius when it has 
been set to music. 

In 1854 Newman was called by the Irish Bishops 
to be Rector of the Catholic University in Dub- 
lin. He obeyed, still going by a sign, as we are 
told in a volume privately printed, My Campaign 
in Ireland, which is an instalment of a longer nar- 
rative. He had prepared his way, during the stress 
of a great anxiety—the Achilli trial—by delivering 
nine lectures before his Irish friends on the idea 
and scope of a University. As we read them now, 
although names and persons are slightly antiquated, 
the view taken is, in its philosophical aspect, large, 
and in the topics with which it is concerned, mod- 
ern. Newman kept in his eye the Platonic form 
of Oxford, vindicating it against the fashionable 
London “ bazaar or pantechnicon ” in which wares 
of all kinds were heaped together for sale, and an 


80 NEWMAN 


examination which was little else than a feat of 
memory became the decisive test. The new learn- 
ing, however miscellaneous, was no culture, unless 
it brought enlargement of mind. Newman defined 
this to be “ philosophy,” which was “ reason exer- 
cised on knowledge; the elements of the physical 
and moral world, sciences, arts, pursuits, ranks, 
offices, events, opinions, individualities viewed, not 
in themselves, but as relative terms, suggesting a 
multitude of correlatives, and gradually, by suc- 
cessive combinations, converging one and all to 
their true centre.” 

He that had acquired this faculty of judging 
soundly about all things was the educated man; 
to create him was the end of University teaching, 
whether it employed the ancient classics, or con- 
temporary literature, or mathematics, or any given 
number of sciences. A real University could not 
live on paper, by examinations; nor would lectures 
alone do its work; there must be a current of 
thought set in motion by the daily intercourse of 
tutors with pupils and of pupils with one another. 

Quoting Copleston and Davison, who had 
championed these principles against the utilitarian 
writers of the Edinburgh, Newman left an open- 
ing, if somewhat narrow, for the introduction of 
modern science, history, law, and philology, as the 
German schools cultivated them; but this far- 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 81 


reaching movement seems to lie beyond his hori- 
zon. In theory such an expansion of studies was 
provided for; but the difference between an Acad- 
emy which investigates or discovers, and a Univer- 
sity which teaches, could never be overlooked. 
Details and practical distinctions Newman passed 
by in this general survey; what was to be under- 
stood by ‘‘a cultivated mind ” he exhibited in his 
own person and described with a felicity which 
Plato might have envied. He would not, it is true, 
give up to critics ‘“‘ that antiquated variety of hu- 
man nature and remnant of feudalism called a 
gentleman,” whose features he described in a de- 
lightful piece of portraiture; as surely no Athenian 
would either. But he would add to it; he included 
under its proper notion “ intellectual excellence ”’; 
as Matthew Arnold said afterwards, the Barba- 
rians must be made into Greeks. ‘‘ That perfec- 
tion of intellect,” Newman repeated, “‘ is the clear, 
calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all 
things, each in its place, and with its own charac- 
teristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its 
knowledge of history, almost heart-searching from 
its knowledge of human nature; it has almost super- 
natural charity, from its freedom from bitterness 
and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, 
because nothing can startle it; it has almost the 
beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so 


82 NEWMAN 


intimate is it with the eternal order of things and 
the music of the spheres.” 

That little word ‘“‘ almost ” which rings in this 
passage so loudly, betokens a reservation not always 
made, and now less than ever, when the claims of 
culture fail to be discussed. It may not hold aloof 
from religion, nay nor from theology, on the 
ground that since these are but sentiments and the 
expression of them, they have no place in a cur- 
riculum of knowledge. This false idea Newman 
combats with an eloquence which broadens into 
periods majestic as the Alexandrian, but so pointed 
in argument that, while indicating how finite is our 
compass, they refute the Agnosticism which was 
gathering strength under his eyes, though waiting 
to be named. He calls it “‘ a form of infidelity of 
the day.” It troubled him more than it did his 
hearers; he comes back to it again and again. 
Curious how this long-sighted watchman sees the 
Spencers and Huxleys marching up from beneath! 
‘“‘T may be describing a school of thought which 
every one will disown; and pointing to teachers 
whom no one will be able to descry ”’; but men were 
at hand who would lay down that religion was not 
the subject-matter of a science; and, therefore, that 
while its teachers were at liberty to dogmatize in 
their churches, they must be shut out of the schools. 

Newman would have it otherwise, and he gives 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 83 


reasons which, good or bad, address themselves to 
the intellect, not to blind prejudice. As Burke de- 
sired that religion should exalt her mitred front in 
Parliaments, so would he set up in Universities the 
chair from which might be taught her science and 
history by competent professors; and how should 
any teach doctrines so deep and sacred who had 
no faith in them? His argument on behalf of a 
Catholic University was complete. But the enter- 
prise failed. No blame attaches to the Rector who, 
though hardly an organizing head, was sympa- 
thetic, instant on all emergencies, unwearied in 
bringing home to the public his idea of what such 
an institution should be. His retirement was a de- 
feat, a prelude to many more during years which 
saw Newman isolated, and misunderstood on both 
sides, a “‘ prisoner pale with Paul’s sad girdle 
bound,” in his cell at Edgbaston, as once at Oriel 
or Littlemore. 

Before quitting Dublin, however, he had en- 
riched his generation with a number of Essays, 
genial in tone, pregnant in their half-sentences with 
such wisdom as reminds us of Goethe’s Prose Say- 
ings, and not inferior to them. He does not dis- 
dain elementary studies, on which he writes amus- 
ing apologues as wittily turned as Addison’s papers 
in the Spectator. He enforces discipline of mind, 
still recommending exactness, balance, sharp watch 


84 NEWMAN 


over our own statements to ourselves of what we 
think we know, in contrast to that ‘‘ barren mock- 
ery of knowledge which comes of attending great 
lecturers, or of mere acquaintance with reviews, 
magazines, newspapers, and other literature of the 
day which, however able and valuable in itself, is 
not the instrument of intellectual education.” This 
implies a habit of order and system, “ the actual 
acceptance and use of certain principles as centres - 
of thought, around which our knowledge grows 
and is located.’”’ And he concludes, ‘‘ where this 
critical faculty exists, history is no longer a mere 
story-book, or biography a romance; orators and 
publications of the day are no longer infallible au- 
thorities; eloquent diction is no longer a substitute 
for matter, nor bold statements, or lively descrip- 
tions, a substitute for proof. This is that faculty 
of perception in intellectual matters . . . anal- 
ogous to the capacity we all have of mastering the 
multitude of lines and colours which pour in upon 
our eyes, and of deciding what every one of them is 
worth.” 

It will be seen that Newman, for all his un- 
fathomable thoughts concerning the world of spirit, 
was no mystic dreamer, absorbed in self-contempla- 
tion. He possessed, in speech as in writing, a gift 
that De Quincey ascribes to Burke’s conversation, 
of which he remarks, “‘ one thought rose upon the 


Cardinal Newman, 1861. 
From a photograph by Adolphe Beau. 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 85 


suggestion, or more properly upon the impulse, of 
what went before.’’ You could never tell—but 
neither could he—how, as he followed the idea, his 
journeying would lead him, for he did not begin 
with a thesis, but was inspired by the light within; 
therefore he sought as an enquirer that which, when 
found, he recognized to be his own. 

Though wielding always a power to which 
Cicero’s Latin word auctoritas fitly corresponds, he 
is, while a dogmatist, never dogmatic. Johnson 
played the dictator, Carlyle became an oracle; 
Newman reasoned, and if on assumptions he 
frankly stated them. His quality is candour, aptly 
as well as amusingly indicated by his writing out 
every argument of an adversary before he would 
reply to it. No medieval schoolman excelled him 
in the art of distinctions, which prompted a very 
good judge in earlier times to describe him as “a 
Lord Chancellor thrown away.” Extreme verbal 
accuracy delighted him; nor would he be satisfied 
in himself or his pupils with roundabout phrases; 
abstract positions must be defined, limited, and 
made clear by illustration; cognate ideas must not 
be left without their several signs, and mistakes 
were to be obviated before they arose. Much of 
this training, he says, was due to Dr. Hawkins, “a 
man of most exact mind himself ’’; but acquaint- 
ance with Aristotle would foster it, and the ex- 


86 NEWMAN 


igencies of controversy, whether as regarded the 
old Greek heretics or the dispute between England 
and Rome, would bring it to perfection. 

Yet there is one drawback to a style so exqui- 
sitely shaded. The careless reader misses half its 
meaning; an unscrupulous or hasty critic fastens on 
terms which, because, as they stand, he is unable 
to deal with them, he wrenches from their context, 
daubs with his own colour, and holds up to reproba- 
tion. Newman hated paradox, but he was often 
bold, endlessly impatient of words that by contin- 
ual repetition had ceased to signify anything, and, 
as Thomas Mozley observes with entire truth, “ he 
would not be in a current.”” He must say things in 
his own way, if he spoke at all. These were among 
the causes why Anglicans, Catholics, and the aver- 
age Englishman mistook him on various occasions, 
or attributed to his writings sentiments and views 
which they do not contain. 

Without any desire to be mysterious—at all 
events, in really important questions—he addressed 
the initiated by mere force of a style which could 
not stoop to popularity, and by a range of thought 
in keeping with it. From this point of view his 
works are not for the multitude; they teach the 
master rather than the novice, always taking for 
granted a degree of mental activity which, not 
common at any time, is threatened in our age by 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 87 


the very wealth of material cast upon it, as Tarpeia 
in the legend was smothered by the golden shields. 
Various and contrary as the opponents were who 
troubled Newman for the next twenty years—from 
his leaving Dublin till he accepted the Cardinal’s 
hat—and though among them we reckon minds of 
undoubted ability, the criticism which includes them 
all is that they failed to comprehend an intellect 
greater than their own, busy with problems to the 
vast horizons of which their view could not ex- 
tend. | 

Newman was to be the Christian prophet and 
philosopher of the coming century. ‘“‘ By the soli- 
tary force of his own mind,” to quote J. A. Froude, 
he has not only restored Catholicism in the English- 
speaking world to a place and power which it 
might seem hopelessly to have lost; he has also re- 
acted on the mental habits of those whom he joined 
by teaching them a language they could not have 
gained without him, modelling afresh their meth- 
ods of apologetics, making known to the Roman 
schools a temper of philosophy and style of argu- 
ment which promise a common ground, a forum or 
an agora, between North and South where, at least, 
they may discuss with understanding, and by draw- 
ing their eyes to the abyss of the unknowable which 
must ever lie beneath our most certain affirmations. 

Newman realized, as others did not, that Chris- 


88 NEWMAN 


tianity was fading away from the public order; 
that Christians would be called upon more and 
more to exercise their individual judgment, to mix 
in a society no longer Catholic or Protestant, but 
free-thinking as was the later Roman Empire, 
sceptical yet superstitious, corrupt yet polished; 
and he began to provide against the evil day. His 
policy would have gone upon lines, novel as re- 
garded the immediate past, now irrecoverable, but 
identical with those by which Clement, Origen, 
Basil, and the early Fathers had guided their course 
under heathen rule. It was a programme for to- 
morrow which implied great and permanent losses, 
not pleasant to think of, a reliance on energy in- 
stead of routine, and what many took to be a 
change of front. By this time Darwin had pub- 
lished his Origin of Species; the Bible criticism 
familiar to Germany since Lessing had put out 
feelers in Essays and Reviews; Colenso was apply- 
ing his arithmetic to the Pentateuch; Hegel had 
been heard of in Oxford. Newman was alive to 
the signs of the times; he read and gave them a 
meaning. Events have shown that he was not de- 
ceived. 

Since, however, no published writings are extant 
by which to determine his attitude towards ques- 
tions as they arose, it would be hazardous, and 
something more, to attempt doing that which he 


BIRST CATHOLIC: PERIOD 89 


has left undone. His relations with Cardinal Wise- 
man were strained by the Achilli trial, an untoward 
event due to the Cardinal’s own action, and ending 
in a disaster the blame of which must be laid on 
his shoulders. Wiseman’s health was giving way; 
he meant kindly, but his impulses were evanescent. 
He failed to support Newman in Dublin; did not 
obtain for him the mitre promised at Rome; and, 
after entrusting him with full powers to undertake 
a revision of the English Catholic Bible—known 
as the Douay version—called them in again at the 
instance of obscure booksellers. This last disap- 
pointment was probably of some consequence to 
English literature, and ought not be passed over 
without reflection. 

Neither a Hebrew scholar nor an adept in 
Hellenistic Greek, little if at all versed in the 
story, even now not unravelled for the most part, 
of the Latin Vulgate, it was not as an expert that 
Newman would have presided over the committee 
of revision. But he was the greatest living master 
of English prose; his memory and his heart were 
steeped in the noble vernacular, of ancient origin, 
on which King James’ Bible is founded; his ear, 
always fastidious, was attuned to its periods; and 
the doctrine which he held concerning translation 
had been stated in a classic page. He would never 
have sacrificed a rhythm, beautiful in itself and dear 


go NEWMAN 


from long association, to barren uniformity; under 
his guidance the result, while as exact as real schol- 
arship could make it, would have been literature, 
not a sort of key or lexicon, which by force of gram- 
matical scruples should evaporate the spirit without 
much enlightening the ignorant. By definition a 
committee has no genius; but Newman would, at 
least, have equalled Tyndale and surpassed Luther 
—individuals to whose mighty influence the Ger- 
man or the English Bible owes a unity of style amid 
astonishing diversities of matter, which has fur- 
nished even to profane authors an example and a 
standard. 

It was not to be. In the Revision of 1881 New- 
man, though invited, took no part. After the ex- 
panding era of the movement which we term 
Romantic, when art, letters, and freedom were 
called upon to glorify the Catholic Church, a time 
set in the leading spirit of which was Manning 
rather than Wiseman, represented by Veuillot, 
Ward, and others less distinguished. With such 
a party Newman could neither think nor act, out- 
side the sphere in which all Catholics are agreed. 

His heart went forth to Lacordaire and Monta- 
lembert, in whose general line of thought and 
conduct he enthusiastically concurred, considering 
them to be before their age. He “ read with a spe- 
cial interest,” and perhaps some application to him- 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD gI 


self, in Montalembert’s beautiful volume, “‘ of the 
unselfish aims, the thwarted projects, the unre- 
quited toils, the grand and tender resignation of 
Lacordaire.”” He mused upon the impending loss 
of the Temporal Power in verses which had once 
breathed his aspirations for the Church of Eng- 
land, threatened by the despoiler thirty years pre- 
viously. Still would religion, though an “ outcast 
from her awful ancient shrine,” pour her rays on 
the world, “‘ keen, free, and undefiled.”” But he 
foresaw the pilgrim Church in a society where she 
could claim no privileges; and his aloofness from 
the strife in which others were zealous gave offence. 
Newman never was an ecclesiastical politician: he 
looked onward to the morrow, and these were 
thinking of to-day; hence the misunderstanding 
which lasted for years. 

Younger men now came to him for counsel, 
among them Sir John (afterwards Lord) Acton, 
who was destined to be in his own department of 
history and bibliography the most learned scholar 
of his time. Although Newman did not, perhaps, 
look into the Origin of Species, just then causing a 
great explosion of talk all round, he heard of its 
contents from one well qualified to grasp them, 
Dr. W. K. Sullivan, and realized the significance 
of such a crisis in biology, not greeting it, as did 
Carlyle, with an “ Ernulphus curse,” but prepared 


92 NEWMAN 


to consider what it might mean. But physical sci- 
ence was no more within his province than Roman 
politics. 

He would not, however, limit freedom of dis- 
cussion in this or any other subject, provided 
it were carried on as during the palmy days of 
Scholasticism, when every aspect of philosophy 
was brought into view—witness the Summa of 
St. Thomas; but then the Church remained as 
a Court of Appeal where religion pleaded rand 
obtained her rights. How, under conditions so 
altered, the same results were to be secured was, 
of course, a problem. ‘The rule, as Newman laid 
it down, is patience: “to bear for a while with 
what we feel to be error, in consideration of the 
truth in which it is eventually to issue.” And he 
said, “‘ if we reason we must submit to the condi- 
tions of reason. . . . That is no intellectual 
triumph of religion which has not been preceded by 
a full statement of what can be said against it.” 

Long afterwards, in controversy with Mr. Glad- 
stone, he expressed his views touching the liberty 
of unlicensed printing; they were moderate and to 
the purpose. ‘‘ When the intellect is cultivated,” 
he said, ‘‘ it is as certain that it will develop into 
a thousand various shapes, as that infinite hues and 
tints and shades of colour will be reflected from the 
earth’s surface when the sunlight touches it; and 


FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 93 


in matters of religion the more, by reason of the 
extreme subtlety and abstruseness of the mental 
action by which they are determined.” Some way 
might be found, he hoped, of uniting what was free 
in the new structure of Society with what was au- 
thoritative in the old—a middle term between the 
abuses of the censorship and the anarchy of an 
irresponsible journalism, such as he saw around 
him. 

On these lines, with due caution as addressing 
the general public, Newman would have edited the 
Rambler, a review to which he contributed some 
delightful papers on the “* Ancient Saints ’’ and the 
Order of St. Benedict. But he soon withdrew from 
the position. In the later fortunes of the magazine 
he was not concerned. At Edgbaston he had set 
up an admirable school in which, as Lacordaire at 
Soréze, he found relaxation from his “ unrequited 
toils.”’ But an opening appeared at Oxford; he 
bought five acres, was planning an Oratory, and 
had to sell the land again; Manning and the friends 
with whom Manning acted had stepped in the way. 
The Archbishop writes to Rome in 1866, “I see 
much danger of an English Catholicism of which 
Newman is the highest type. It is the old 
Anglican, patristic, literary Oxford tone trans- 
planted into the Church.” Next year a painful 
correspondence which took place between these 


94 NEWMAN 


very different men, each highly endowed, but the 
Oratorian incomparably the greater, ended in their 
life-long estrangement. 

By this time an event had come to pass which, 
though it could not reconcile to him such critics as, 
on the Catholic side, mistrusted his views and 
dreaded his influence, had brought all England to 
admire, to revere, and in large measure to under- 
stand, the extraordinary character whose isolation 
was a tribute to his genius. The Apologia pro 
Vita Sua had appeared and taken high rank among 
English classics. 


CHAPTER IV 
APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 


ENGLAND possessed, in the year 1864, three 
eminent teachers, or, as was said of old, prophets, 
remarkable for the strength and splendour of their 
speech, the fervour of their convictions, and their 
steady opposition to the axioms, dogmas, and infer- 
ences of the prevailing Liberal creed. However 
they might disagree on certain points by no means 
unimportant, they were at one in denouncing the 
utilitarian ethics and economics, the virtue which 
was merely a drawing of bills at long or short dates 
on a balance of profits, the religion that, being 
only a form of respectability, was Pharisaism, and, 
in brief, all that went to make up the “‘ Enlighten- 
ment ” preached from the days of Adam Smith to 
the Manchester era. 

These critics of ‘“‘ progress”’ on the lines laid 
down by Bentham were Carlyle, Ruskin, and New- 
man. Strike their names and works out of the 
nineteenth century, it would be shorn of that which, 
in the twentieth, is coming to be regarded as Brit- 

95 


96 “NEWMAN 


ain’s treasure of wisdom for life and conduct, art, 
industry, and the ideals whereby we hold of the 
Infinite and Eternal. So much is plain matter of 
fact beyond denial. But in that same year, 1864, 
each of these great ones had become to the multi- 
tude a stone of stumbling and rock of offence. 
Newman, above all, as the embodied Reaction, 
who had gone over to a Church that smote this 
angel of light with anathema, was thrust on one 
side, or remembered only as the traitor of 1841 
and 1845. 

He owed his restoration not to any friend, 
but to an undreamt-of enemy. Hurrell Froude’s 
younger brother, James Anthony, had never been 
Catholic in his sentiments, though slightly at- 
tached to Newman while an undergraduate. His 
religious beliefs were at all times nebulous; but he 
combined with them, whatever they might be, a 
more than Puritan hatred to the Church of Rome. 
In this feeling he was joined by Charles Kings- 
ley, whose novel of adventure, Westward Ho, 
breathes an intense dislike to everything Catholic, 
and is furiously Elizabethan, as if composed when 
the Spanish Armada was sailing up the Channel. 
There is a poem of the first rank, beautiful in 
diction, bewitching in fancy, that gives to this un-_ 
kind spirit a renown and adorns it with a grace 
such as might well prove irresistible to those who, 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 97 


like Charles Kingsley, had little or no acquaint- 
ance with members of the old religion—we are 
alluding to Spenser’s Faérie Queene. Spenser 
has been called the Puritan Ariosto; he was Kings- 
ley’s favourite reading; and the heated atmos- 
phere of Elizabethan politics struck to the story- 
teller’s brain, as he dwelt on those far-off times, 
to reproduce them in his vivid colours. 

Froude was doing the same thing in his own 
way. Singularly picturesque, and equally inac- 
curate, with strokes as enchanting as they were 
often delusive, he had begun to deliver his ver- 
sion, which read like a fairy tale, of Henry VIII’s 
divorce and Queen Elizabeth’s resistance to Rome. 
But what had this to do with Newman? Nothing 
apparently; yet he stood in the background, for 
that generation of Englishmen, as an incalculable 
force, representing the power against which their 
fathers had risen up. He wished to undo the 
settlement of the Reformation; he was now the 
enemy, as Philip of Spain had been, or Parsons 
the Jesuit, or the stern Pius V. 

Moreover, Kingsley, as we may see in Hypatia, 
detested the Alexandrian schools and saints, to 
which he ascribed the corruption of Christian 
morals by celibacy and monasticism; but if ever an 
Alexandrian wrote in English, it was John Henry 
Newman. Still, an occasion must be sought for 


98 NEWMAN 


any quarrel, however well prepared. Kingsley 
found one in reviewing Froude’s History of Eng- 
land. He was arguing that ‘“‘a deed might be a 
crime, or no crime at all—like Henry VIII’s mar- 
riage with his brother’s widow—according to the 
will of the Pope ’’; and he went on to ask, “‘ What 
rule of morality, what eternal law of right and 
wrong, could remain in the hearts of men born 
and bred under the shadow of so hideous a super- 
stition? ”’ 

From the virtue of purity he passed to the 
virtue of truth. ‘‘ Truth, for its own sake,” he de- 
clared, ‘“‘ had never been a virtue with the Roman 
clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need 
not and, on the whole, ought not to be; that cun- 
ning is the weapon which Heaven has given to 
the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male 
force of the wicked world which marries and is 
given in marriage. Whether his notion be doc- 
trinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.” 

To this paragraph neither reference nor proof 
of any kind was appended. Mr. Froude, with 
characteristic lightness, quotes Kingsley as saying 
that ‘‘the Catholic clergy did not place truth 
among the highest virtues,” and “ that Newman 
acknowledged it.”” The charge was what we have 
seen. It would not speedily have come round to 
the accused, had not a friend at Scarborough sent 


Cardinal Newman, 1861. 
From a photograph by Adolphe Beau 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 99 


him the number of Macmillan’s Magazine for 
January, 1864, in which it appeared. He wrote 
to the publishers, drawing their attention, as gen- 
tlemen, to a “ grave and gratuitous slander ”; but 
he asked no reparation, and would not dream of 
expostulating with writer or editor who could put 
forth such an allegation without appending evi- 
dence in proof. Kingsley answered, “that my 
words were just I believed from many passages 
of your writings; but the document to which I 
expressly referred was one of your Sermons on 
‘Subjects of the Day,’ No. XX, in the volume 
published in 1844, and entitled ‘Wisdom and 
Innocence.’”” He concluded, “I am most happy 
to hear from you (as I understand from your let- 
ter) your meaning; and I shall be most happy, 
on your showing me that I have wronged you, to 
retract my accusation as publicly as I have made 
i” 

Sir Leslie Stephen, who knew him well, has ob- 
served that Kingsley ‘‘ was a man of most quick 
and generous sympathies,”’ but, as he showed on 
occasion of the controversy thus introduced, not 
of any “ logical closeness.” Called upon to make 
good a definite and categorical charge, he attempts 
to shift the burden on the man whom he has ac- 
cused, offering him one reference, not to a passage, 
but to a discourse of seventeen pages, and that not 


100 NEWMAN 


Catholic in date or place, together with an indica- 
tion of his writings passim, now some twenty-four 
volumes. Newman, with grave irony, pointed out 
these facts, adding merely—‘‘ When I received 
your letter, taking upon yourself the authorship, 
I was amazed.” 

To a third person, who came between, he said 
something more—-‘‘ I suppose, in truth, there is 
nothing at all, however base, up to the high mark 
of Titus Oates, which a Catholic may not expect 
to be believed of him by Protestants, however 
honourable and hard-headed.” But still, “‘ for a 
writer, when he is criticizing definite historical 
facts of the sixteenth century to go out of his way 

. . to say of me, ‘ Father Newman informs 
us that Truth for its own sake need not, and on 
the whole ought not, to be a virtue with the Ro- 
man clergy,’ and to be thus brilliant and antitheti- 
cal (save the mark!) in the very cause of Truth, 
is a proceeding of so special a character as to lead 
me to exclaim, after the pattern of the celebrated 
saying, ‘O Truth, how many lies are told in thy 
name!’ ” 

These were scathing words. How “so grave 
an inadvertence”’ as Kingsley had fallen into 
should be explained was his affair, not that of the 
innocent party; but Newman gave the other side 
fair warning. ‘‘If they set about proving their 


APOLOGIA ‘PRO .VITA SUA <101 


point,” he wrote, “‘ or should they find that im- 
possible, if they say so, in either case I shall call 
them men.” If, instead, they proposed to smooth 
the matter over by publishing to the world that 
he had ‘‘ complained ” or that “ they yield to my 
letters, expostulations, representations, explana- 
tions,” they had better let it all alone, “ for a half- 
measure settles nothing.” 

Kingsley should now have grasped the situation, 
laid before him in this letter with masterly clear- 
ness. He took a little while to answer. It is 
probable that he consulted Froude, and there were, 
it seems, in the background those who would urge 
him to the attack, if they did not yet interpose. He 
was so ill advised as to decline giving the proofs, 
definite and particular, of the accusation to which 
he had committed himself. He wrote—‘ As the 
tone of your letters (even more than their lan- 
guage) makes me feel, to my very deep pleasure, 
that my opinion of the meaning of your words was 
a mistaken one, I shall send at once to Macmillan’s 
Magazine the few lines which I enclose.” 

What this apology was worth, Newman, keep- 
ing with admirable skill to his part of disinterested 
spectator, showed in a brilliant page. Kingsley 
said—" Dr. Newman has, by letter, expressed in 
the strongest terms his denial of the meaning which 
I have put upon his words.” The “ unjust, but 


102 NEWMAN 


too probable, popular rendering,” answered his 
critic, would be—"“ I have set before Dr. Newman, 
as he challenged me to do, extracts from his writ- 
ings, and he has afhxed to them what he conceives 
to be their legitimate sense, to the denial of that 
in which I understood them.” Such a proceeding 
had indeed been challenged, but by Mr. Kingsley | 
not vouchsafed. Again, the apology went on— 
“No man knows the use of words better than Dr. 
Newman; no man, therefore, has a better right to 
define what he does, or does not, mean by them.” 
Of which the popular interpretation would be— 
“He has done this with the skill of a great master 
of verbal fence, who knows as well as any man liy- 
ing how to insinuate a doctrine without committing 
himself to it.’ Finally, this was the amende hon- 
orable— It only remains, therefore, for me to 
express my hearty regret at having so seriously 
mistaken him, and my hearty pleasure at finding 
him on the side of truth, in this or any other mat- 
ter.” Which, returned Newman, will be thus con- 
strued—‘* However, while I heartily regret that I 
have so seriously mistaken the sense which he 
assures me his words were meant to bear, I can- 
not but feel a hearty pleasure also at having 
brought him, for once in a way, to confess that 
after all truth is a Christian virtue.” 

Against this reading Kingsley protested, with- 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 103 


drew two passages, but still maintained that “ by 
referring publicly to the sermon on which my 
allegations were founded, I have given not only 
you, but every one, an opportunity of judging of 
their injustice. Having done this, and having 
frankly accepted your assertion that I was mis- 
taken, I have done as much as one English gentle- 
man can expect from another.”” Newman replied 
in a calm letter to Messrs. Macmillan, quoting a 
second judgment in confirmation of his own, that 
an apology so worded was misleading and utterly 
inadequate. But in this form it appeared on Feb- 
ruary I, 1864. 

It has been necessary to give the text, as far as 
might be, on which Newman founded the “ Re- 
flections ” that concluded his publication of this 
extraordinary correspondence. For he put the 
whole immediately into print. Those “ Reflec- 
tions ” took the world by storm. With point and 
irony, as with merciless precision, they turned 
Kingsley’s guns upon himself. The sermon in dis- 
pute was not preached by a Catholic priest; New- 
man had never said what was charged upon him, 
either as a Protestant or a Catholic; yet his accuser 
waived this, which was the main question, con- 
gratulated him on his “‘ tone,” and ended by taking 
“the word of a professor of lying’”’ that he did 
not lie. They ‘‘ were both English gentlemen.” 


104 NEWMAN 


Who was it, then, that did not mean what he said? 
‘ Preaching without practising; the common theme 
of satirists from Juvenal to Walter Scott! ”’ con- 
cluded Newman, and he quoted from The Fortunes 
of Nigel a biting passage, ‘‘O Geordie, jingling 
Geordie, it was grand to heard Baby Charles lay- 
ing down the guilt of dissimulation and Steenie 
lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence.” 

Brought to bay, and yet backed up by unseen 
allies from the old anti-Tractarian camp, Kingsley 
argued that the title-page and “‘ Reflections ” of his 
adversary’s pamphlet were fair game; they entitled 
him to open a fresh attack in forty-eight pages 
on all the Oxford leader had published. “ What, 
then, does Dr. Newman mean?” that was the. 
question. This indictment came out towards the 
end of March. It travelled over a wide ground; 
but the conclusion was not to be mistaken. “I 
am henceforth in doubt and fear,” said Kingsley, 
‘““as much as any honest man can be, concerning 
every word Dr. Newman may write. How can I 
tell that I shall not be the dupe of some cunning 
equivocation, of one of the three kinds laid down 
as permissible by the blessed Alfonso de Liguori 
and his pupils? . . . What proof have I that 
by ‘mean it? I never said it!’ Dr. New- 
man does not signify, ‘I did not say it, but I did 
mean it’?” . 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA ios 


We may pause to observe that this was the very 
interpretation, deprecated by his critic, of Kings- 
ley’s paragraph beginning “‘ No man knows the 
use of words better than Dr. Newman,” against 
which the writer exclaimed, but which he now 
adopted. But it wasmuch more. Newman called 
it “ poisoning the wells,’ and the metaphor is not 
too strong. Whatever St. Alfonso de Liguori, 
or any one else, maintained in the chapter Of 
Equivocation, that was their concern, not his; nor 
had Kingsley one shred of evidence on which to 
convict the accused, still less to hold him up as an 
equivocator—in plain English, a liar—on prin- 
ciple and in theory. ‘This, at all events, was 
speedily to be made clear. The deplorable pam- 
phlet has left a cloud not on the subject of its de- 
nunciations, but on its author, whose feelings had 
furiously carried him away, and whose undoubted 
talents were never those of a critic or a philosopher. 
His evil fortune led him to employ on the loftiest 
and deepest intellect then extant among English- 
men weapons which broke at the first encounter. 
Yet even this was not the head and front of his 
offending. He should have been mindful that we 
are men by our trust in one another; that, more 
than any one of his generation, Newman had given 
hostages to truth, for what could have persuaded 
him to sacrifice position, fortune, prospects, to 


106 NEWMAN 


court obloquy and spend his days in exile from a 
world which would have showered its favours 
upon him, did he but speak its language—what, 
except devotion to duty and the fearless utterance 
of a most unpopular belief? There was no equiv- 
ocation here. 

In his heart Newman took the affront like a 
Christian, with a calmness that has almost been 
made a charge against him, as if he ought to have 
felt more, unless he were guilty. His conduct was, 
perhaps, as near perfection in a moral point of 
view as it was daring and effective. He deter- 
mined on replying, without delay, in a work which, 
coming out by instalments, would possess the mo- 
mentum of a pamphlet and, when it was done, the 
permanence of a record. His powers of continued 
exertion had always been astonishing. They were 
now put to the test. On consecutive Thursdays, 
between April 21 and June 2, he put forth in 
seven parts the Apologia pro Vita Sua. 

This work was the fulfilment of a promise tacitly 
made to himself that, in the improbable event of a 
challenge being formally put to him by a person 
of name, it would be his duty to meet it, and to 
plead his own cause at the bar of England. That 
opportunity had occurred. And Kingsley’s ques- 
tion shaped the answer which must be given. 
“He asks what I mean,” said Newman, “not 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 107 > 


about my words, not about my arguments, not 
about my actions, as his ultimate point, but about 
that living intelligence by which I write, and 
argue, and act. He asks about my mind, and its 
beliefs, and its sentiments; and he shall be an- 
swered. . . . I must give the true key to my 
whole life; I must show what I am, that it may 
be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may 
be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. . . . 
I will vanquish, not my accuser, but my judges.” 
His accuser had been vanquished already. The 
above quotation is taken from the Second Part. 
In the First of only twenty-four pages, which are 
nearly all omitted in subsequent editions, a chas- 
tisement certainly deserved, but, as Rhadamanthus 
would allow, not inadequate, was dealt out to the 
offender who had illustrated his own motto and 
shown that, in attempting to judge of Newman’s 
acts and writings, a lie had been the nearest ap- 
proach to truth which he could make. ‘“‘ A modest 
man or a philosopher,” observed’ the accused, 
“would have scrupled to treat with scorn and 
scofiing, as Mr. Kingsley does in my own instance, 
principles and convictions, even if he did not ac- 
quiesce in them himself, which had been held so 
widely and so long—the beliefs and devotions and 
customs which have been the religious life of 
millions upon millions of Christians for nearly 


108 NEWMAN 


twenty centuries—for this is in fact the task on 
which he is spending his pains.” 

Such being his drift, what was his method of 
argument? ‘That the great leader must be a knave 
or a fool, and that he was not quite sure which, 
probably both. Kingsley did, one is sorry to con- 
fess it, write of Newman—‘ He would either de- 
stroy his own sense of honesty, i.e. conscious truth- 
fulness—and become a dishonest person; or he 
would destroy his common sense, i.e. unconscious 
truthfulness, and become the slave and puppet 
seemingly of his own logic, really of his own fancy. 
. . . I thought for years past that he had be- 
come the former, I now see that he has become the 
latter.” 

To us who look back on the Tractarian con- 
troversy it‘seems incredible that any one, however 
resolute against the Oxford teaching, should deem 
its professors deliberate, conscious knaves, and 
Newman above all. But was he, then, a simple- 
ton? As, in a withering page, the man so taunted 
drew out the charge, was he, though “ not a born 
fool,” yet “ a self-made idiot, one who has drugged 
and abused himself into a shameless depravity,” 
and ‘‘an intellectual sot’? ? On February 1, the 
accuser had given up his charge ‘of knavery; 
March is not out when he reiterates it in such 
fashion that it may serve as one of imbecility to 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA tog 


boot. Challenged on his original ground, he could 
bring no evidence to prove his assertion, and was 
convicted of false witness by the voice of the world. 
“Well,” observes Newman, “I should have 
thought he had now nothing whatever more to 
do.” But, ‘‘‘ Vain man!’ he seems to make an- 
swer, ‘ what simplicity in you to think so! If you 
have not broken one commandment, let us see 
whether we cannot convict you of the breach of an- 
other. If you are not a swindler or a forger, you 
are guilty of arson or burglary. By hook or by 
crook you shall not escape. Are you to suffer or J? 
What does it matter to you who are going off the 
stage, to receive a slight additional daub upon a 
character so deeply stained already? But think 
of me, the immaculate lover of Truth, so observ- 
ant (as I have told you, p. 8) of “ hault courage 
and strict honour ’’—and (aside)—“ and not as 
this publican,”—do you think I can let you go 
scot-free instead of myself? No; xoblesse oblige. 
Go to the shades, old man, and boast that Achilles 
sent you thither.’ ” 

Another classical saying rises to one’s lips on 
reading, for the twentieth time, this tremendous 
invective. Littera scripta manet—the words of 
genius are immortal. Who could stand up against 
a retort like this, armed to deadly effect by the 
assailant’s own phrases, winged words which came 


110 NEWMAN 


back as barbed arrows? But more remained be- 
hind. On the strength of three or four imagined 
‘ economies,” that is to say, prevarications, gleaned 
from the title-page and concluding dialogue of 
Newman’s pamphlet, Kingsley had pounced upon 
him as a worthy brother of the “ Roman moral- 
ists,” and he was ‘‘ merged and whirled away in 
the gulph of notorious quibblers, and hypocrites, 
and rogues.” ‘Then it was that the accuser com- 
mitted that last unpardonable crime of “ poisoning 
the wells,’ by a process which is not rare in Eng- 
lish controversy with Catholics. 

Not without significance had Newman alluded 
in one of his letters to Titus Oates. ‘“‘ The mul- 
titude,”” says Macaulay, writing of the so-called 
Popish Plot, ‘“‘ applauded Oates and his confed- 
erates, hooted and pelted the witnesses who ap- 
peared on behalf of the accused, and shouted with 
joy when the verdict of Guilty was pronounced. 
It was in vain that the sufferers appealed to the re- 
spectability of their past lives; for the public mind 
was possessed with a belief that the more conscien- 
tious a Papist was, the more likely he must be to 
plot against a Protestant government. It was in 
vain that just before the cart passed from un- 
der their feet, they resolutely afirmed their inno- 
cence; for the general opinion was that a good 
Papist considered all lies, which were service- 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 111 


able to his Church, as not only excusable, but 
meritorious.” 

To this belief Charles Kingsley, who would not, 
to save his life, have done what he thought base 
or cruel, was now appealing; and it is hardly too 
much to say that, were the intended victim any 
other Catholic, he would have fallen beneath his 
fury. But the assailant mistook his man. Here 
was no Italian, no Jesuit of the Spanish faction, 
no professor of the Roman College who might be 
attacked with impunity from a thousand miles 
away, but one whose antecedents were public 
property, an Oxford man from his youth up, who 
had taught nothing in secret, who was known all 
over the country, and who had a gift almost 
unrivalled of touching the heart when he spoke or 
wrote. The witness of Thomas Mozley would 
have been echoed from one end of England to the 
other had the need of it appeared. ‘ During 
the whole period of my personal acquaintance and 
communication with Newman,” he tells us, “‘ I 
never had any other thought than that he was 
more thoroughly in earnest, and more entirely 
convinced of the truth of what he was saying, than 
any other man I had come across yet.” Anthony 
Froude, again, does more than exonerate the 
teacher whom he did not choose to follow. ‘‘ New- 
man’s whole life had been a struggle for truth,” 


112 NEWMAN 


he said. ‘‘ He had neglected his own interests; 
he had never thought of them at all. He had 
brought to bear a most powerful and subtle intel- 
lect to support the convictions of a conscience 
which was superstitiously sensitive.” We may be- 
lieve witnesses, it used to be taught, who have died 
for their testimony. Newman was a living mar- 
tyr, and, could he get a hearing, his victory was 
assured. 

He had to tell the story of a conversion, a 
change of mind, or ‘ repentance,” in its literal 
meaning, as remarkable to the psychologists as 
Luther’s, but in a contrary direction; as profound 
as Augustine’s, to which he has himself compared 
it; and, should the Catholic Church extend its con- 
quests in the world where Shakespeare is king, not 
less likely to have enduring results than had the 
African saint’s on the intellect of the Middle Ages 
which he formed. The prevision may seem exag- 
gerated; we will submit reasons in due course why 
it should be thought, if anything, too little rather 
than too much drawn out. 

Moreover, the circumstances were such as make 
of these things a world’s tragedy, set forth on the 
high stage of Oxford, in the background St. 
Mary’s, reminding us of the temple that so often 
figures in Sophoclean drama, solemn as religion 
itself. ‘These are elements, sublime or affecting, 


Cardinal Newman, about 1876. 


From a painting by Lady Coleridge 
Reproduced by the courtesy of Lord Coleridge 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 113 


to which distance will add a perspective as the 
movement goes forward and English literature 
spreads. For Newman’s prose cannot grow obso- 
lete; it will endure by its own self-centred poise. 
Thanks to its grave and tender wisdom, and its 
feeling for that in man’s heart which throbs to 
some rhythm of eternity, it can never be forgotten. 

But Newman’s task was one to daunt the bold- 
est. He understood his countrymen; and, though 
nothing more subtle or searching exists in any lit- 
erature than their own will match, they resent ex- 
planations which travel beyond commonplace, as 
if Hamlet had never been written. Twice the au- 
thor incriminated had left one position and passed 
over to the opposite. From an Evangelical, tinged 
with Whately’s Liberal dye, he had become a 
Laudian, a sort of Nonjuror born out of due time, 
reviving doctrines, calling back men, that modern 
England, as Dr. Arnold angrily warned him, 
would as little put up with as Cromwell had put 
up with the ‘‘ Malignants.’’ His march along the 
Via Media had involved him in battle on both 
sides; but whereas he never would yield an inch 
to progress or reform, he was veering ever towards 
the Roman camp, and at length entered it a fugi- 
tive, asking pardon on his knees. The worst an- 
ticipations, the hardest judgments, were thus ful- 
filled. And he was aware of it. ‘‘ How could I 


114 NEWMAN 


dare, how could I have the conscience,” he said 
now, reviewing men’s opinions as they were then, 
‘‘ with warnings, with prophecies, with accusations 
against me, to persevere in a path which steadily 
advanced towards, which ended in, the religion of 
Rome? And how am I now to be trusted, when 
long ago I was trusted, and was found wanting? ” 

If we would realize what a daring adventure, 
he had set out upon, we must imagine not one 
Kingsley, but numbers in every class, prepossessed 
with a conviction that Newman had intended, from 
some early unknown date, to sap the foundations 
of the English Church and open its gates to the 
enemy. ‘This view is held even yet; “ secret his- 
tories ’’ of the Oxford movement are devised, with 
excerpts and half-sentences from his correspond- 
ence or his books in support of it. Isaac Williams’ 
Tract on ‘‘ Reserve” played an amusingly serious 
part in these charges. While the “ Remains” of 
Hurrell Froude were a standing witness to the con- 
trary, being frank to the verge of indiscretion, 
these innocent Fellows of Oriel loomed in the 
background like conspirators with dark lanterns, 
intent on kindling a literal conflagration. They 
were, in fact, obeying a mysterious power, and 
went on under its influence; but how little could 
any one of them, not excluding Newman, have 
given an account of the widespread Romantic cru- 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 115 


sade, which all over Europe was in motion, guided 
by no supreme commander, a reaction or a last 
attempt of historical Christianity to defend itself 
against unbelief? 

Compeers Newman had, beyond a doubt; not, 
however, “ the Roman moralists ’’ whom he never 
had looked into, but Chateaubriand, de Maistre, 
Stolberg, Tieck, Arnim, Brentano, Friedrich 
Schlegel, and Novalis—to mention only these— 
whose works throw a broad light on the Apologia. 
Nay, we must go farther back. Goethe’s early 
years marked the time, and Strasburg Cathedral is 
the high place, from which that Romantic move- 
ment set out. We may connect Goethe with 
Walter Scott; Johnson and Burke with Cole- 
ridge, who again is a disciple of Schelling; and 
Schelling, in the days of Newman’s greatest power 
at Oxford, was himself the oracle of Munich. Nor 
can we overlook the learned and devout Southey, 
writer of epics, or Wordsworth, most spiritual- 
minded among English poets, both of whom con- 
tributed to the great restoration, and were heralds 
of it. 

Perhaps for those who cannot “‘ grapple with 
whole libraries,” it may suffice to glance into the 
astonishing essay, Christianity in Europe, which 
Novalis left behind him and Tieck published, if 
they would comprehend how the spirit was brood- 


116 NEWMAN 


ing over the waters and bringing thence a new cre- 
ation. “* Luther,” says this remarkable pioneer, 
who died in 1801, “‘ dealt with the Christian re- 
ligion according to his own fancy, misunderstood 
its genius, and brought in an utterly new doctrine - 
—that of the supreme authority of the Bible. 
This was to frustrate the inspiring and re- 
vealing power of the Holy Ghost. . . . Then, 
what was at the beginning hatred of the Catholic 
Church became by degrees hatred of the Bible, of 
the Christian faith, of all religion. Nay, more; 
the hatred of religion developed into hatred of all 
enthusiasm. It denounced imagination and feel- 
ing, morality and love of art, the past and the fut- 
ure; it barely acknowledged man to be the highest 
among animals; it reduced the creative music of 
the universe to the monotonous whirring of an 
enormous mill, driven by the stream of chance.” 
Readers of Sartor Resartus will fancy that they 
are listening to Carlyle, ‘‘Oh, the gloomy Gol- 
gotha and Mill of Death! ””—but it is not so; 
these great decisive protests find in him their 
echo, not their starting point. Nevertheless, in 
pages like these we discern the ground which was 
common to Carlyle and Newman; here the Puri- 
tan mystic may embrace his Catholic brother. For 
Novalis was not precisely orthodox; yet his ex- 
travagance and that of his kind bred an enthusiasm 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 117 


which could no longer keep within the letter of 
the Bible or the formularies; it panted after the 
water-brooks of life. Thus another of the school, 
Eichendorff, admirably defines Romanticism, “ it 
is home-sickness—longing for the lost home of 
the universal, the Catholic Church.” “But it was 
also—we may grant to Dr. Brandes, who judges 
it to be a sort of decadence—the “ revolt of the 
individual” against a narrowing prose-conception 
of reality, seen and unseen. Carlyle, who is 
its Titan, explains the world by great men or 
“heroes.” And Newman finds the key to it in 
personality, which is the same view wearing its 
academic robes. 

But the lonely genius, who would escape from 
all-devouring impersonal science, from dead laws 
to living powers, and from abstractions to history, 
cannot overlook the Church that opens a refuge to 
him. Whether he accepts or refuses, the opposi- 
tion between ‘‘ Past and Present” will strike his 
sense and create, if not the home-sickness of Eich- 
endorff, at least the fierce regrets of Carlyle. And 
thus we arrive at a philosophy which, because it 
takes the individual, the Ego, to be first and last 
of realities, welcomes a Church, the most concrete 
imaginable, in order to defend itself when algebra 
in economics, in morals, in politics, and beyond 
all in religion, has made an end of the self-deter- 


118 NEWMAN 


mining conscience. An exact parallel to New- 
man’s acceptance of Church authority meets us in 
Carlyle’s submission to the disciplined or abso- 
lute State. In both cases the reaction was from 
anarchy (plus the policeman or plus the preacher), 
towards something higher because organic, and the 
more stable by reason that it possessed within itself 
a principle of divine transcendent right, to what- 
ever category it belonged. 

Greatly to realize one’s self by means of institu- 
tions—the University, the Church, or the State— 
was an idea congenial to Newman’s temperament, 
and, as he saw life, this was the problem of re- 
ligion as of culture. ‘“‘ The moral and social 
world,” says in Loss and Gain a character who is 
uttering the author’s sentiments, “is not an open 
country; it is already marked and mapped out; it 
has its roads. . . . Forms of religion are facts; 
they have each their history. They existed before 
you were born, and will survive you. You must 
choose; you cannot make.” And Charles Reding 
answers by granting so much: “I protest to you 
that if the Church of Rome is as ambiguous as our 
own Church, I shall be on the way to become a 
sceptic, on the very ground that I shall have no 
competent authority to tell me what to believe.” 

‘Why not use your private judgment?”’ Thus 
would no small number have replied and gloried 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 11g 


in their freedom; but the Tractarian had flung 
aside this alternative, which he thought a hollow 
pretence. ‘‘ The heart is commonly reached,” he 
told Lord Brougham, “ not through the reason, 
but through the imagination, by means of direct 
impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, 
by history, by description. Persons influence us, 
voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. 
Many a man will live and die upon a dogma; no 


man will be a martyr for a conclusion.” He drives 
the argument home by appealing to experience: 


“No religion has yet been a religion of physics or 
of philosophy. It has ever been synonymous with 
Revelation. It has never been a deduction from 
what we know; it has ever been an assertion of 
what we are to believe . . . a message, or a 
history, or a vision.” And, to sum up, “ Action 
flows not from inferences, but from impressions— 
not from reasonings, but from Faith.” 

Such is the canon, inductive after Bacon’s 
manner, upon which Newman goes about to es- 
tablish religion; such was the guiding clue in his 
own past. The 4pologia—we have not lost it out 
of sight one instant—is the story of impressions 
leading to actions, of a faith made secure by con- 
duct. Some have pictured Newman as “ fleeing 
always before the ghost of scepticism.” He need 
not, on this showing, have denied it. Faith is an 


\\\ 


RS eS 


120 NEWMAN 


act, and the reward of acts, else it would be as lit- 
tle meritorious or heroic as the mechanical opera- 
tions by which the heart beats; in this high sense 
it would not be human. Thomas Mozley, in a 
valuable page, says that “‘ Newman filled up his 
whole time, taxed his whole strength, and occu- 
pied his whole future. . . . He reduced retro- 
spection to very narrow compass, to a few faces, to 
flowers on a bank or a wall, to a fragrance or a 
sound. . . . He never took solitary walks if he 
could help it. . . . Newman would not be alone 
and left to his own thoughts when he was neither 
studying, nor writing, nor praying.” 

_ Herein may be discovered the reason why in 
friendship he was so strangely dependent on others, 
and not they on him, wide as the differences must 
have been if we take mere intellect into account. 
Johnson, too, preferred the most casual of visitors 
to his own company; but that was a matter of con- 
- stitution, although he resented disagreement with 
his opinions, as making them less certain. But 
Newman was not of a melancholy temper; though 
“without a grain of conviviality,” his nature was 
cheerful; disciples he must have, friends living un- 
der the same roof, companions in his daily walks. 
We have seen his intimate relations with Hurrell 
Froude, and how he leaned on that fine character. 
Of Ambrose St. John he wrote yet more emphati- 


APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA si1ar 


cally, “‘ He was my life, under God, for thirty-two 
years.” To Newman faith always resided in a 
goodly fellowship; and again we are called back to 
Novalis, who made this brotherly consent almost a 
sacrament of belief. 

Nor can we wonder, if it is not pure atomic 
thought that should decide us, but “‘ impressions,” 
“voices,” a “‘ history,’ and a “ vision.’’ Carlyle 
in his Journal notes it down: “ Religion, as Novalis 
thinks, is a social thing. Without a Church there 
can be little or no religion. The action of mind on 
mind is mystical, infinite; worship can hardly (per- 
haps not at all) support itself without this ard.” 
And so enthusiasm was “ schwarmerei ’’—the 
swarming of social bees; in far higher language, 
there could scarcely be faith unless there were a 
“Communion of Saints”’; or we might go on to 
infer that this was the scope and essence of St. 
Paul’s “‘ charity,” which is love of the brethren. 
Fraternity, then, is the condition of faith; heresy 
arises when love has grown cold; and, to conclude 
with Pascal, ‘‘ the heart has its reasons.”’ 

In this way the Apologia comes to be a book of 
friendships, “‘ Amicorum Liber”; and he who 
took for his pattern Moses or Luther, the lonely 
great man, is found at the head of a party, is a 
master in Israel, and moves on amid the din, the 
battle-cries, the confusion which accompany march- 


122 NEWMAN 


ing crowds. But there is an unseen cloud of wit- 
nesses, over and above these, by whose influence 
the conflict is decided in the end. To Newman 
the Fathers were not dead. He consulted them, 
and as soon as their mind was clear to him he made 
it his own. This was the influence which proved 
decisive. ‘‘ What was the use,” he asked, “ of 
continuing the controversy, or defending my posi- 
tion, if after all I was but forging arguments for 
Arius or Eutyches, and turning devil’s advocate 
against the much-enduring Athanasius and the 
majestic Leo? Be my soul with the Saints! and 
shall I lift up my hand against them? Sooner may 
my right hand forget her cunning, and wither out- 
right, as his who once sthetched it out against a 
prophet of God—perish sooner a whole tribe of 
Cranmers, Ridleys, Latimers, and Jewels—perish 
the names of Bramhall, Ussher, Taylor, Stilling- 
fleet, and Barrow from the face of the earth—ere 
I should do aught but fall at their feet in love and 
in worship, whose image was continually before 
my eyes, and whose musical words were ever in 
my ears and on my tongue!” 


CHAPTER V 
THE! LOGIC: OF, BELIEF 


As we have seen, Newman, after describing his 
Sicilian adventure, wrote that he “ had no roman- 
tic story to tell.” But he had one, and it was told 
so naturally, with such simple good faith, urban- 
ity, and candour, that the whole nation became a 
sympathetic, and ere long a convinced, audience. 
Not the “‘ Letters ” of Pascal, nor those of Junius, 
won more instant success. The Apologia, as it 
was given to the world Thursday after Thursday, 
appeared in all hands, was read in clubs, in draw- 
ing-rooms, by clerks on the top of omnibuses, in 
railway trains, and one had almost said, in pulpits, 
for everywhere its author was discussed, his 
pathetic or striking sentences quoted, his English 
more than ever admired. For a moment the 
Tractarians came on the public stage, in their 
habits as they lived; the drama was interpreted by 
its chief actor, without whom it never could have 
been conceived. Manning wrote to Wiseman that 
“it was like listening to the voice of one from the 
dead.” Or, as Church, afterwards Dean of St. 


¥23 


124 NEWMAN 


Paul’s, expressed it, ‘‘ Here was to be told not only 
the history of a change, but the history of a deep 
disappointment, of the failure of a great design, 
of the breakdown of hopes the most, promising and 
absorbing; and this, not in the silence of a man’s 
study, but in the fever and contention of a strug- 
gle wrought up to the highest pitch of passion and 
fierceness, bringing with it on all sides and leaving 
behind it the deep sense of wrong.” 

True as these words are, they render only the 
judgment of a devout Anglican who had been 
Newman’s disciple, but quitted him at the parting 
of the ways. To Dean Church the “ argument,” 
as Milton would call it, broke off in 1845 without 
a conclusion; failure was the last word. But to 
those who looked out across the Channel, and sur- 
veyed the currents of European thought, another 
view offered itself. The Tractarian was a chapter, 
as we have said, in the Romantic Movement; and 
this again took its inspiration (however mingling 
with it less ethereal elements) from Christian 
sources, not Anglican, of course, but antique and 
medieval, of which the outward and visible habitat 
was Rome. 

But instead of a fresh volume added to the in- 
terminable series of controversy, here was a life, 
revealed in its innermost workings, the heart put 
under a glass that made it transparent. It had 


tHe LOGIC OF BELIEF 124 


been Rousseau’s boast that he would do this un- 
paralleled thing in his own person; and he did it 
—at what a cost to the decencies of human reti- 
cence, to the laws of friendship, to the claims of 
gratitude! Newman, observing a punctilious self- 
respect, nor making free with any other man’s 
reputation, set up in the Temple of Fame this 
tablet, on which all might read the story of his 
days, anticipating, said Gladstone, whom it awed 
and overcame, the last great Judgment itself. 
Impossible that the argument should be left in 
the air with Newman’s farewell to Oxford. He 
must say whether his quest had ended in delusion, 
what was this Vita Nuova which he had found; 
and he felt nowise loth to dwell upon it. His con- 
fidence, glancing out in rays which sometimes burnt 
or stung, when—for example in the Anglican 
Difficulties—he addressed his former disciples, 
had been thought by them unkind. He had said 
bitter things about the Establishment; even now 
he might appear to be satirical; but he did not 
mean his language for satire. “I recognize in the 
Anglican Church a time-honoured institution,” he 
said, “it may be a great creation, though it be 
not divine, and this is how I judge of it.” With 
extraordinary prescience he added, ‘‘ Doubtless 
the National Church has hitherto been a service- 
able breakwater against doctrinal errors more fun- 


126 NEWMAN 


damental than its own,” but “ how long this will 
last in the years now before us it is impossible to 
say, for the Nation drags down its Church to its 
own level.” He had no desire to weaken it, so far 
as it maintained dogmatic truth; but he had never 
as an Anglican loved the Establishment any more 
than Whately did, or Hurrell Froude, or Keble, 
who were all enemies of the Erastian idea. 

In the Roman Church he recognized at once a 
reality which was quite a new thing to him. “I 
gazed at her,” he says, ‘‘ almost passively as a 
great objective fact.” In January, 1846, he had 
written—“‘ I realize more that we are leaving 
Littlemore, and it is like going on the open sea.” 
But only because he must turn his back on old 
associations, not as if he were drifting towards 
scepticism. No, from the time he became a Catho- 
lic he was in perfect peace; he had never had one 
doubt; ‘‘ it was like coming into port after a rough 
sea ’—these are his words—“ and my happiness 
on that score remains to this day without inter- 
ruption.” 

The quest had, therefore, ended in discovery 
and triumph. If by “ Liberalism ” we understand 
“the tendency of modern thought to destroy the 
basis of revealed religion ’’—as Dean Church says 
exceedingly well—“ and ultimately of all that can 
be called religion at all,” Newman had met it in 


Cardinal Newman. 
From an engraving by Joseph Brown 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 127 


himself and beaten it down. He put this ques- 
tion: ‘‘ What must be the face-to-face antagonist, 
by which to withstand and bafile the fierce energy 
of passion and the all-corroding, all-dissolving 
scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries? ”’ 
He had no intention to deny that truth is the real 
object of our reason, and that if it does not attain 
to truth, either the premiss or the process is in 
fault; but he was speaking, not of right reason, 
but of reason as it acts in fallen man. Its ten- 
dency, in fact, was towards simple unbelief. 
“Resolve to believe nothing,” he wrote in 1841, 
“and you must prove your proofs and analyse 
your elements, sinking further and further, and 
finding ‘ in the lowest depth a lower deep,’ till you 
come to the broad bosom of scepticism.” That 
was Newman’s unalterable persuasion. 

And, in this form, it would have been counter- 
signed by one who differed from him through 
whole diameters on other subjects—we mean 
Carlyle. ‘That impatient mystic went, indeed, to 
lengths, as regards the impotence of reasoning in 
divine things, from which, in wiser moments, he 
has drawn back. Yet this, concerning “‘ Diderot 
and his sect,” is worth quoting :— 

“That in the French system of Thought (called 
also the Scotch, and still familiar enough every- 
where, which for want of a better title we have 


128 NEWMAN 


named the Mechanical) there is no room for a 
Divinity; that to him, for whom intellect, or the 
power of knowing and believing, is still synony- 
mous with Jogic, or the mere power of arranging 
and communicating, there is absolutely no proof 
discoverable of a Divinity; and such a man has 
nothing for it but either, if he be a half spirit, as 
is the frequent case, to trim despicably all his days 
between two opinions; or else, if he be of whole 
spirit, to anchor himself on the rock or quagmire 
of Atheism—and farther, should he see fit, pro- 
claim to others that there is good riding there. So 
much may Diderot have demonstrated; a conclu- 
sion at which we nowise turn pale.” 

Newman, also, did not set any great store on 
the “argument from design’ (about which this 
is not the place to investigate); but while he 
started with the being of a God, which was as 
certain to him as his own existence, he looked out 
into the world of men, and it seemed simply to 
give the lie to that great truth of which his being 
was so full. ‘“‘I am far from denying,” he re- 
peats, ‘the real force of the arguments in proof 
of a God, drawn from the general facts of human 
society, but these do not warm or enlighten me; 
they do not take away the winter of my desola- 
tion, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow 
within me, and my moral being rejoice. ‘The sight 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 129 


of the world is nothing else than the prophet’s 
scroll, full of lamentations, and mourning, and 
woe.” 

He enforces the lesson in a majestic page, moy- 
ing as a chorus in some dark tragedy, every line 
of which is a masterpiece, ending sadly—“‘ all this 
is a vision to dizzy and appal, and inflicts upon 
the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which 
is absolutely beyond human solution.” 

There have ever been two ways, not of attempt- 
ing to pierce an impenetrable cloud—for specula- 
tion cannot do it—but of shaping our thoughts 
so as to bear with the problem. We may suppose 
that man was once a brute beast who is slowly 
climbing upward; or that he was made upright 
and has fallen from his first estate. Newman de- 
cides for the latter. ‘‘Jf there be a God, since 
there is a God, the human race is implicated in 
some terrible aboriginal calamity.” The position 
has been violently assailed; it is none the less ac- 
cepted now as in every former age by the Chris- 
tianity of East and West, which set up on this 
basis a theology of restoration. 

In the Apologia it becomes an argument for 
some “ concrete representative of things invisible ” 
Which, whether miraculous or not, will have in it 
strength to stand against the “ wild living intel- 
lect,” the “ universal solvent,”’ whereby every truth 


130 NEWMAN 


is melted into doubt, every institution undermined. 
What Newman regards as a principle of anarchy 
appears in Carlyle’s half mournful, half satirical 
outbursts as “‘ victorious analysis.” In Goethe’s 
Faust it is dissolving chemistry, experiment which 
kills in order to anatomize, but which can never 
create, nor breathe into elements the life it has 
taken from them; this is the “ spirit that always 
denies,” or the ‘‘ Everlasting No.” Unlike Car- 
lyle, however, Newman does not refuse to that 
demonic power a faculty, in itself prodigious, of 
simulating life; it can call up a world in its own 
image and likeness, put on the airs of a prophet, 
though a false one, and seduce mankind with its 
Julians, Voltaires, Humes, and other glories of 
secular civilisation. How shall it be overcome? 
He answers—by an infallible Catholic Church. 
It will be remarked that the inquiry is not specu- 
lative but practical, as the solution might almost 
be termed political, and it would be strikingly so 
did we employ, rather than these pale abstract 
terms, the language, glowing with prophetic col- 
ours, of the Hebrew Testament. The Catholic 
Church is to Newman the present, ever-enduring 
reign on earth of Messiah, who clothes in His 
great attributes the deputies that rule by His fiat. 
As we pass along the sentences in which our Chris- 
tian apologist surveys and measures the enemy, we 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 131 


ask if he will brand him with a title from the 
schools; but never once does Newman speak, 
though so close to it, of “ methodic doubt,” nor 
has he mentioned Descartes. Elsewhere his allu- 
sions to Francis Bacon are kind, if not benevolent. 
He calls him the ‘‘ most orthodox of Protestant 
philosophers’; but it was Descartes, not Bacon, 
who as a modern Socrates taught by questioning; 
and from the French mathematician is derived that 
potent but “‘ uncreating ” analysis which in Hume 
startled the scholastic as the conservative, and in 
Kant revealed Pure Reason empty of contents 
though solicited by ideals. 

With such historical reflections Newman is not 
occupied, although he felt the momentum of some 
unprecedented change to which they would have 
pointed. In any case he meets the “ usurpations 
of reason’ not simply by counter-reasoning—keen 
as his dialectics might be when he had need of 
them—but by authority carried to the highest 
pitch, acting as a sovereign from whose court 
there is no appeal, for “‘ this power, viewed in its 
fullness, is as tremendous as the giant evil which 
has called for it.” 

But he will not grant that authority, even on a 
scale so vast, weighs down and overbears the intel- 
lect, which, he says, ‘‘ does by opposition grow ”’; 
he considers the whole history of the Church as 


132 NEWMAN 


giving to this accusation a negative, but especially 
the debates that have preceded or accompanied all 
its decisions. He looks on the genius of Rome 
not so much as going before the thoughts of its 
great teachers, but as sifting, choosing, and at last 
ratifying them when opinions have been tested by 
years of controversy. ‘‘ In the process of inquiry 
and deliberation, which ended in an infallible enun- 
ciation, individual reason was paramount.” On 
the other hand, he observes that in reading ecclesi- 
astical history, when he was an Anglican, it used 
to be forcibly brought home to him how “ the 
initial error of what afterwards became heresy was 
the urging forward of some truth against the pro- 
hibition of authority at an unseasonable time.” 
And being asked in conversation what was the 
main fault of heresiarchs, he replied after a mo- 
ment of recollection, ‘‘ Their impatience.” 

By this time his readers had forgotten Mr. 
Kingsley; but the charges in detail were to be 
refuted, and in an Appendix it was done. The 
high line of apologetics was exchanged for a series 
of brilliant skirmishes, which we need not fight 
over again. On subjects demanding the insight of — 
a Shakespeare into the human heart, Kingsley had 
not taken the trouble to study, and one may be 
pardoned for supposing that he would seldom have 
comprehended, what his adversary taught. He 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 133 


was mistaken, over and over again, as regarded 
the circumstances, outward and accidental, under 
which Newman wrote his sermons or began to edit 
the Lives of the English Saints. But the deeper 
answers, not to him who went his own way, but 
to earnest-minded students, on matters like the 
‘**Economy,” reserve in communicating religious 
knowledge, the laws of concrete reasoning, and our 
apprehension of the Divine, were to be given in 
the Grammar of Assent. We shall proceed to 
touch upon them in the next pages. 

Concerning the Apologia two things may be 
said by way of epigraph or conclusion. It fixed 
the author’s place not only in the hearts of his 
countrymen, but in the national literature. It 
became the one book by which he was known to 
strangers who had seen nothing else from his pen, 
and to a growing number at home, ignorant of 
theology, not much troubled about dogma, yet 
willing to admire the living spirit at whose touch 
even a buried and forgotten antiquity put on the 
hues of resurrection. No autobiography in the 
English language has been more read; to the nine- 
teenth century it bears a relation not less character- 
istic than Boswell’s Johnson to the eighteenth. 
That is our first observation. 

Our second is that the Apologia should be com- 
pared and in due measure contrasted with Renan’s 


134 NEWMAN 


Souvenirs of My Youth. We cannot attempt here 
the interesting task. A keen critic judges that, as 
a work of art, Renan’s bears away the palm. New- 
man, he says, earnest and strenuous as becomes 
his English breeding, falls into the tone of col- 
legiate reminiscences which make us feel how se- 
cluded was life at Oxford sixty years ago. And 
Renan, though in style not more plastic than his 
great contemporary—for both preferred musical 
impressions to those of sight—-was happy in 
possessing the Breton canvas, Tréguier, with its 
ancient cathedral, the sea over which his ancestors 
had voyaged, the legends and the landscape equally 
wild, from which he went on to Issy, St. Sulpice, 
and the modern world of Paris. ‘There are, un- 
doubtedly, these differences. But a more vital one 
lies in the character: on this side an amiable 
dilettante, who saunters through his time, gracious 
and Greek of the Ionian school, the amused ob- 
server, the artist before all; and on that a solitary, 
an enthusiast, for whom eternity had an awful sig- 
nificance and doubt an intolerable anguish. 
Newman does not often quote from French 
authors; he was but slightly acquainted with them. 
’ Yet, by accident, he gives us in his Grammar of 
Assent Pascal’s celebrated judgment on Mon- 
taigne; and such would have been his own did 
he look into Renan’s Drames Philosophiques or 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 125 


Feuilles Détachées. Of the marvellous essayist 
from whom Shakespeare borrowed, Pascal has 
written—‘‘ Montaigne involves all things in such 
universal, unmingled scepticism as to doubt of his 
very doubts. He ridicules all attempts at cer- 
tainty. Delighted with exhibiting in his own per- 
son the contradictions that exist in the mind of a 
freethinker, it is all one to him whether he is suc- 
cessful or not in his arguments. The virtue that 
he loved was simple, sociable, gay, sprightly, and 
playful; to apply one of his own sayings, ‘ Igno- 
rance and incuriousness are two charming pillows 
for a sound head.’ ” 

To associate Renan with ignorance and incuri- 
ousness would be merely absurd. But the rest 
of this description fits him exactly; and what is 
‘more, he concludes pretty much as did Montaigne. 
““ Man is aware at the present day,”’ he says in the 
preface to his philosophical comedies, “‘ that he 
never shall know anything of the Supreme Cause 
of the universe or of his own destiny.” In Renan’s 
view philosophy is the most refined of amusements, 
lending itself to a dialogue in which nothing is- 
affirmed, and all things are suggested, shading off 
into the infinite tones of contrast. It will end, he ' 
says, in the illusions of a lyrical scene. 

That is remarkable, for Newman also held that 
music and the form of poetry gave to the spirit 


136 NEWMAN 


a medium in which it might express its thoughts 
more thrillingly than by logic or syllogism. But 
whereas to Renan the play was the thing, and the 
matter only a pretext, his unrecognized yet historic 
rival has left to after ages in the Dream of 
Gerontius an act of faith which affirms God and 
immortality in most touching verse, sincere as his 
own soul. On all this an admirable book remains 
to be written. As in living actors, we perceive 
here the problem that Newman had long since at- 
tempted to resolve in his University Sermons, and 
now took up in the Grammar of Assent. Who is 
in the right, Pascal or Montaigne? “Shall we 
say,’ he inquires, ‘“‘ that there is no such thing as 
truth and error, but that anything is truth to a man 
which he troweth?”’ Or is there some nobler 
alternative? The 4pologia demonstrated his own 
love of truth at all costs; he had now to show that 
it was attainable, and by what method. 

The truth which Newman has in view, it must 
never be forgotten, is religious truth, although 
when he considers how we arrive at it, certain laws 
of the spirit common to all truth reveal themselves. 
He is not a philosopher, as Kant was, occupied 
with intellect for its own sake, analysing, construct- 
ing, in the realm of pure ideas, after the manner 
which becomes a metaphysician. What were New- 
man’s metaphysics? It is impossible to say. An 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 137 


observer whose penetration equals his grace of 
style, M. Ernest Dimnet, has remarked that he 
does not once quote from St. Thomas Aquinas. 
Neither does he refer to any treatise of Aristotle’s 
except the Nicomachean Ethics. He had not given 
an hour to Descartes, although every line which 
Newman published concerning the laws of belief 
modifies where it cannot be said to reject that 
hardy thinker’s doctrine, by which truth becomes 
equivalent to a consciousness of clear ideas or, as 
was afterwards alleged, to Rationalism. 

Nor, of course, did the Oxford scholar define 
his attitude towards Hegel, or know the name of ~ 
Schopenhauer, any more than he could have told 
you what German critics were saying about the 
Bible. He lived in the same years with Strauss 
and Baur; he never opened their works, even in 
translation. Like Bishop Butler, from whom he 
learned his method, the greatest English religious 
philosopher of the nineteenth century dwells apart 
in a world of his own, original, self-absorbed, free 
from the vain desires of literary men, belonging to 
no school, unless it were the inductive school of 
Shakespeare. 

He is never a priori; and this very English, or 
again very Hebrew, dislike of formulas which an- 
tedate the facts has brought him into trouble with 
Latin readers who transpose his affirmations to 


138 NEWMAN 


the dogmatic scale. But, in this technical sense, 
they were not dogmas. He went by experience, 
which to him was reality; he took things as he 
found them, and himself first of all. ‘‘ We are in 
a world of facts,’ he wrote, ‘‘ and we use them, 
for there is nothing else to use.” He was a dog- 
matist in this, which is Pascal’s account of the 
term, not in that other way of starting from an 
abstract proposition self-certified, to weave thence 
a long chain of deductions, not drawn from obser- 
vation and therefore not needing to be verified by 
means of it. Did he then deny the a priori? No, 
he left it to those who could handle it. His own 
gift was different. He began like Descartes, but 
with more largeness of assertion, or a poet’s in- 
sight, not as a mathematician. 

Newman said—“ If I may not assume that I 
exist, and in a particular way, that is, with a par- 
ticular mental constitution, I have nothing to specu- 
late about, and had better let speculation alone. 
Such as I am, it is my all. . . . I am what I 
am, or I am nothing. I cannot think, reflect, or 
judge about my being without starting from the 
very point which I aim at concluding. My ideas 
are all assumptions, and I am ever moving in a 
circle. I cannot avoid being sufficient for myself, 
for I cannot make myself anything else, and to 
change me is to destroy me. . . . My only 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 139 


business is to ascertain what I am, in order to put 
it to use. It is enough for the proof of the value 
and authority of any function which I possess, to 
be able to pronounce that it is natural.” 

We may now perceive what is meant by the 
statement, vague in itself, that for Newman the 
key to truth is personality. He takes himself for 
granted, his nature, faculties, instincts, and all 
that they imply. Metaphysicians have commonly 
started from the universal to arrive at the par- 
ticular; but he, who is not of their sect, reverses 
the process. We have no time to show that his 
long acquaintance with the Alexandrian Fathers 
and their discussions on the Trinity strengthened 
a bias which in him was almost supreme. But we 
cannot doubt the influence. It is well known how 
the schools are perplexed when they would define, 
that is to say, register the abstract equivalents, of 
this “ I myself I,” and how they have failed to do 
it. For them it is the problem of squaring the 
circle;—so far beyond the sounding-line which 
logic throws out are, in Wordsworth’s language, 
the “abysmal depths of personality.”” Newman 
—and that is why, not long ago, we compared 
him to Shakespeare—boldly took the opposite 
way. ‘* Let concretes come first,’ he exclaimed, 
““and so-called universals second.” He went back 
to the days of childhood, when he was “‘ alone with 


140 NEWMAN 


the Alone’’; and on this adamantine basis of 
reality he set up his religion. 

Soon, however, he found, unlike Descartes, that 
it was not the clear ideas, with conscious chains 
of reasoning between, which gave to existence its 
value, but rather the obscure; not those which we 
can demonstrate and, as it were, compel others to 
accept whether they will or no, but intuitions such 
as flash out upon us in “ high dream or solemn 
vision,’ passing glimpses and states charged with 
a significance beyond themselves—resembling in 
life the scenes or situations by which in drama the 
whole character of a personage is shown, though 
merely in specimen. For what other way is there 
to disclose the infinite of real thought and action? 
In the known we must apprehend the unknown, 
and is that to be done by reasoning which we also 
apprehend at the same moment? Consider the 
facts. This undertaking, on the whole quite novel, 
furnished to Newman matter and scope for his 
University Sermons, the chief of which, on “ Im- 
plicit and Explicit Reason,” and the “ Theory of 
Developments in Religious Doctrine,” contain his 
finest as well as his most convincing thought. 

We have seen how the inevitable, though com- 
monly unrecognized, premiss of all reasoning is 
each man’s individual nature, so that if a multitude 
agree, still it is because every one finds in himself 


Cardinal Newman. 


From the painting executed in 1881 by Sir John E. Millais, P.R.A. 
Reproduced by the courtesy of His Grace the Duke of Norfolk 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 141 


a motive for assenting to the view taken by all. 
Whether the motive be weak or valid we do not 
now inquire. But what of the process? In many 
books it is described as an art—the art of logic— 
and rules have been given for its proper exercise. 
Newman, as we might expect, denies this old posi- 
tion, at least in its accepted form. ‘‘ Reasoning,” 
he says, “is a living spontaneous energy within 
us, not an art’’; and he illustrates his meaning 
thus— 

“One fact may suffice for a whole theory; one 
principle may create and sustain a system; one 
minute token is a clue to a large discovery. The 
mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out, and ad- 
vances forward with a quickness which has become 
a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which 
baffle investigation. It passes on from point to 
point, gaining one by some indication; another on 
a probability; then availing itself of an associa- 
tion; then falling back on some received law; next 
seizing on testimony; then committing itself to 
some popular impression, or some inward instinct, 
or some obscure memory; and thus it makes prog- 
ress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff who, 
by quick eye, prompt hand, and sure foot, ascends 
how he knows not himself, by personal endow- 
ments and by practice rather than by rule, leaving 
no track behind him and unable to teach another. 


142 NEWMAN 


. . . And such mainly is the way in which all 
men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason—not 
by rule, but by an inward faculty.” 

So luminous a passage persuades while it exem- 
plifies the doctrine which it recommends. But if 
we allow so much, consequences may follow of a 
startling kind. ‘Truths may be won by processes 
which we cannot remember, or fail to analyse, or 
construe erroneously. Descartes’ criterion of evi- 
dence, clear ideas with lucid chains between them 
of irresistible argument, breaks down, for it need 
not exist, although we are in possession of truth. 
Nay, very often, or always in concrete matters, it 
does not exist. ‘‘ No analysis is subtle and delicate 
enough to represent adequately the state of mind 
under which we believe, or the subjects of belief 
as they are presented to our thoughts.’”’ Newman 
gives an exquisite illustration. ‘“‘ The end pro- 
posed is that of delineating or, as it were, painting 
what the mind sees and feels: now let us consider 
‘ what it is to portray duly in form and colour 
things material,’”’ and how impossible to represent 
‘‘ the outline and character, the lines and shades, in 
which any intellectual view really exists in the 
mind!” He concludes, ‘it is probable that a 
given opinion, as held by several individuals, is as 
distinct from itself as are their faces.” 

Endless applications will occur to thoughtful 


THE LOGIC: OF BELIEF 143 


readers; Newman goes on to suggest those which 
bear on religion. The Bible speaks a human lan- 
guage; but “‘ this vast and intricate scene of things 
cannot be generalized,” and earthly images fall 
far below heavenly realities. Thus we must bear 
to be told that Revelation is an accommodation to 
our weakness, an “ economy,” in its nature un- 
equal to that which it bodies forth. And as is the 
object, so is the evidence. ‘‘ Almost all reasons 
formally adduced in moral inquiries are rather 
specimens and symbols of the real grounds, than 
those grounds themselves.” They are “hints 
towards the true reasoning, and demand an active, 
ready, candid, and docile mind, which can throw 
itself into what is said, neglect verbal difficulties, 
and pursue and carry out principles.” Defenders 
‘of Christianity, however, are tempted to “ select 
as reasons for belief, not the highest, the truest, 
the most sacred, the most intimately persuasive, 
but such as best admit of being exhibited in argu- 
ment, and these are commonly not the real reasons 
in the case of religious men.” | 

It would be difficult to name a controversial 
divine who had ever made these admissions be- 
fore Newman; to the unphilosophical, of whom 
Froude or Kingsley was a type, they would seem 
to border on scepticism, to conceal infinite reserve, 
and to furnish bigotry with weapons of offence. 


{ 


144 NEWMAN 


Newman was engaged upon two inquiries, for 
which the shallow enlightenment of an age when 
Bentham was a prophet and Macaulay a preacher 
could not be prepared. He was grappling with 
the idea of Evolution and the fact of the Uncon- 
scious. So have they been termed since; in his 
language we must call the one ‘ development,” 
the other ‘“‘implicit reason.’ His claim to be 
original in philosophy rests on discoveries to which 
zeal for theology impelled him. 

That they were his own thoughts cannot be 
doubted; yet, in another sense, not his own; for 
evolution had been in the air, a speculation with 
Schelling and Hegel, a working hypothesis applied 
to Nature by St. Hilaire and Lamarck, during a 
long half-century. And in 1819 Schopenhauer had 
published the volumes, On the World as Will and 
Symbol, which remain a classic, notwithstanding 
ail that has since been observed or guessed at in 
the dim regions where life is most real. Newman 
was entirely strange to these movements, whether 
in metaphysics or in biology. If his conclusions, 
as a whole, are akin to Schopenhauer’s; if when 
he says “I know’”’ he perceives that the miracle 
of knowledge is virtually contained in that Ego, 
and in “I will” the heart, the hidden reality of 
existence comes to light; if to his imagination, as 
child, youth, or ancient, phenomena hold up the 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 145 


veil of Maya, which shall be rent and must pass 
away when the ineffable, unknown, yet surely 
divine world is no longer merely the negative of 
what we apprehend with hands and eyes; still, 
unlike the sage of Frankfort, he does not worship 
a blind lawless energy, but finds in his conscience 
a “‘ Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, power- 
ful, all-seeing, retributive.” With Schopenhauer 
he would affirm that will is the motive-power 
which acts beneath all the forces of Nature, up- 
holding and informing them; but for him there is 
a scope, an end, in the scheme of things visible 
and invisible, far beyond our naming, yet tran- 
scendently ethical. 

Such, to Newman, was “ the master-light of all 
our seeing.” He inquires, ‘‘ How should any- 
thing of this world convey ideas which are beyond 
and above this world?” ‘The Agnostic replies 
that it cannot be done; our ignorance of the super- 
natural (if it exist) is absolute; dogmas are words, 
the Bible is a book of metaphors, religion the echo 
of our own voice, not a revelation from on high. 
To refute this “ Que sais-je?”’ by which Mon- 
taigne exploded, as he dreamt, Natural, and in- 
deed all, Theology, Newman appeals to the fact 
within. 

He is perfectly candid; “‘ Were it not for this 
voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my 


146 NEWMAN 


heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a 
polytheist, when I looked into the world.” Let, 
however, this one fact be granted, and inferences 
follow which are as strictly parallel to the knowl- 
edge we possess of sensible phenomena revealed in 
space and time, as the initial information is, in 
‘either case, sufficient though never adequate— 
relative to our needs rather than a full disclosure 
of things in themselves—and, to sum up, a dispen- 
sation corresponding to the limits of our faculties, 
like the stories which we tell children who could 
otherwise learn nothing at all from us. What 
would the so-called laws of physics be to a mind 
lifted above phenomena, endowed with pure intel- 
lectual vision, as we are not? Perhaps not laws at 
all. Nevertheless, we use them and subdue by 
their means those incomprehensible powers to our 
service. 

The analogy with religious ideas, dogmas, 
creeds, does not require to be drawn out. All we 
need remark is that Newman, in these forty pages 
of a pulpit essay, has achieved the design, in ac- 
cordance with Butler, of setting side by side relig- 
ion, which the unbelieving termed ignorance, and 
science, which these enlightened persons held to be 
knowledge, demonstrating that each had its value 
as tested by experience, its limits when the nature 
of reality was taken into account, its symbolic or 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 147 


figured media, whereby to shadow forth verities 
which neither could compass or exhaust. 

Views such as these have grown familiar since 
the new mathematics, physics, chemistry, and 
biology transformed a comparatively simple uni- 
verse to the one we know. Matter has undergone 
fresh definitions; the conscious floats upon an 
abyss which no introspection can fathom; words 
like “‘ heredity ’” and “ solidarity,” while they en- 
large the domain of the individual, carry him over 
the Cartesian border within which he exercised his 
triumphant analysis, and he has become greater, as 
well as deeper, than the mere reasoning machine 
that with Bentham calculated its chances of hap- 
piness. Feeling and imagination are seen to be 
modes of knowledge. Action can demonstrate bet- 
ter than many syllogisms. The will, if it some- 
times warps motives, is likewise a guarantee for 
earnestness, a condition precedent to legitimate 
assent. And search after truth is an heroic pil- 
grimage, not passive acceptance of conclusions as 
morally indifferent as the Rule of Three. 

Newman held that “ it is the mind which reasons 
and not a sheet of paper’’; but he went a step 
beyond this judgment upon artificial logic when he 
brought in as auxiliaries emotion, instinct, and the 
will to believe. This was escaping from literature 
to life, subordinating science to action, or rather 


148 NEWMAN 


testing presumptive knowledge by its behaviour 
in contact with realities; the world was now the 
school, whereas religious apologists had taken their 
narrow little class-room for the world. In this 
truly Aristotelian spirit Newman, after some thirty 
years of meditation, set about writing, with in- 
finite pains, his Grammar of Assent. 

Ten times he went over some of its chapters, we 
are told; over the last, perhaps twenty times. It 
bears the marks of revision in a certain weariness 
which broods upon its pages, and will scarcely 
compare with the great Oxford sermons where it 
handles the same topics. But its wisdom, depth, 
significance, and pathos make of it a work such 
as St. Augustine might have offered to a century 
like our own. It is philosophy teaching by expe- 
rience. How man ought to arrive at certitude 
has been the subject of many an ambitious treatise. 
How, in concrete matters, he does arrive at it, 
was Newman’s concern. ‘‘ No science of life, 
applicable to the individual, has been, or can be, 
written.” The logic by which he directs his 
course will never be a calculus. Is it, then, caprite 
and mere passion? Between these alternatives a 
path, reasonable yet not formal, remains to be 
discovered by the observer who will submit, as 
Bacon advises, to the nature of things, instead of 
laying it upon a Procrustean bed. 


THE LOGIC: OF BELIEF 149 


Thus Newman heaps up in his inventory cases 
for illustration. He abounds in characters, in por- 
traits, in fine dissection of motives, in contrasts and 
shaded lights. He is endlessly interesting, as a 
play or dialogue into which come the personages 
of a varied and ever-moving world. His manner 
of composition always was to think aloud, to let 
objections tell, to imagine his reader as keen as 
himself in hunting down his quarry, Truth. There 
is something everywhere of the soliloquy in what 
he gives us; but how full of knowledge gained at 
first hand, not from books, how rich in delicate 
touches, how swift and sure in its diagnosis, pierc- 
ing to the marrow! We may decline his infer- 
ences, we cannot fail to be charmed with his 
exposition, as happy as Moliére’s, of the numerous 
types with which he deals. From the nature of 
the case he writes like a dramatist. Nor can he 
reduce to a formula the boundless variety of mo- 
tives that lead, in every particular instance, to 
judgments called universal because so many repeat 
them on their own grounds. 

Yet there maybe a law, hinted at, though not 
formulated. Assent is one thing, the inference 
which goes before it, another. If we accept ideas, 
our assent is notional; if objects, it is real. But 
in either case it is absolute. On the other hand, 
inference is always conditional—“ given this, that 


150 NEWMAN 


will follow ”; but ‘‘ whether this be given” is a 
different inquiry. Hence assent and inference 
cannot be the same thing. We might say, in 
popular language, that the intellect infers, the will 
asserts, would we only bear in mind that it is the 
individual who does both, and that faculties are 
abstractions which we ought not to view as sepa- 
rate and real. From inference to assent, in all but 
purely notional problems, there is a gulf, some- 
times yawning into abysses, that lies between 
reasoning and action. This formidable truth is 
constantly overlooked; and men fancy bad faith, 
prejudice, or self-interest in those who cannot an- 
swer their arguments yet will not forsake the 
old position. Again, conviction takes time, but a 
syllogism occupies merely three lines. And the 
same book persuades one, irritates another, leaves 
the third indifferent. 

Newman, for example, quotes Walter Scott as 
an influence which made for Catholic ideas. And 
such the great story-teller was. Scott himself, how- 
ever, thought he had not unsettled any one’s re- 
ligion and took comfort in saying so towards the 
end of his life. Now comes George Eliot who, on 
being asked what had first shaken her confidence 
in Christianity, answered without hesitation that 
it was reading Scott. Clearly the problem of as- 
sent has two real terms, subject no less than ob- 


’ 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 1St 


ject; and in stock treatises the former has been 
forgotten. 

“‘ But,” says Newman, “‘ every one who reasons 
is his own centre; and no expedient for attaining 
a common measure of minds can reverse this 
truth.” We are brought back to the beginning— 
if I know, it is I that know, and not another. 
“‘ Certitude,’’ which denotes the state of knowl- 
edge, is “‘an active recognition’’ of what is set 
before the mind; a judgment, and to the faculty 
of judging it belongs. It is no matter of words, 
for it may take place without their expression, in- 
stantaneously; neither must we confound it with 
apprehension, however complete, since a good 
judge will enter fully into a scheme of defence 
which he does not for one moment dream of 
allowing. It is a mental act, and as such exists 
apart from conditions, if it exists at all. No real 
thing is at the same time hypothetical; we are 
either certain or not certain, we assent or decline 
to assent; and until we pass from inference to the 
act of judgment we have literally done nothing. 

Simple as these observations may appear, they 
throw a flood of light on the controversies of every 
kind which, by their number and violence, have 
furnished to the sceptic plausible grounds for de- 
nying that certitude can be attained. Evidently, 
whether it can or no, the battle of syllogisms 


152 NEWMAN 


proves merely that men are loth to judge, and 
prefer, as the easier task, to argue. When their 
minds are made up, they argue no more. Thus the 
convictions by which, in fact, they live, become 
mute or unconscious; and it has been well re- 
marked that the foundations of the social order are 
unseen, sacro tecta velamine. 

In the Grammar, then, natural or “ informal ” 
inference occupies the place which machine-made 
logic had usurped. There is a sound method of 
reasoning by implicit, unconscious process; the 
method of genius, common sense, or particular 
instinct, applied by each in his own way, successful 
or not, but in any case individual and beyond the 
reach of art. It is a power which varies from man 
to man, nay, in the same man at different seasons. 
It passes, not from one proposition to another, but 
from concrete to concrete, from object to object, 
by means rather of impressions than of expressions, 
with a vital reaction upon all it encounters, and 
as if framing to itself an image or likeness in 
which the spirit may appear. The logician would 
fain write his reasoning on a blank tablet; it can- 
not be; for assent must proceed from within, and 
his most cunning argument finds a world of pre- 
misses already there, into which it will have to be 
dovetailed, or, to change the figure, assimilated. 
His abstract must undergo a process of digestion 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 153 


according to the laws which rule this concrete 
organism. Hence, every book addresses the in- 
itiated; no system but is, in its true nature, secret 
or esoteric; and the individual is a species—in 
Newman’s favourite phrase, “‘ like himself, unlike 
all others.’’ Can we, then, assert of real inference, 
issuing in assent, more than this, that it is not for- 
mal, not reducible to technique, nor capable of 
being taught by a master? 

Yes, we know that it is occupied with wholes, 
not parts or aspects merely; that judgment is the 
form which assent must take; that the man judges, 
and not anything within him impersonal. When 
we examine what he does, we find him proceeding, 
not on a single line of argument, but on all he 
can get, by accumulation, by multiplying signs 
and proofs, as a painter adds touches to his can- 
vas, or a novelist develops his plot, “‘ line upon 
line, and letter upon letter.” But the proofs 
which he thus marshals and combines, often with- 
out adverting to it, as always in a manner too 
subtle for registration, need not, taken singly, be 
adequate to his conclusion; they are, for the most 
part, probabilities varying in strength, capable one 
by one of being demurred to, yet when bound up 
sufficient to justify or to require his acting on 
them. Newman illustrates from the courts of law, 
from literature, the military art, and even from es 

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154. NEWMAN 


physics, his method of convergence, which he 
likens with great felicity to Sir Isaac Newton’s 
celebrated lemma, whereby a regular polygon of 
infinite sides tends to become the circle in which 
it is inscribed. Such are the relations, in concrete 
problems, of inference to assent; ‘“‘a proof is the 
limit of converging probabilities.” 

Nothing could be more suggestive; but we 
need a name for the power, always personal, 
however multiplied, which enables each one of us 
to arrive at our conclusions. It exists, for we 
employ it, and could do no other if we would not 
perish; in a real world we must use objects or be 
subdued by them. Newman terms it the “ Illative 
Sense,” as being parallel to what we call the sense 
of magnitude, or of beauty, or the moral sense. 
He describes its nature, range, and sanction. He 
shows how it is the guiding principle of Con- 
science. He refers to it, as trustworthy, the 
whole conduct of life. It is a personal gift or 
acquisition, supreme over its subject matter, and 
the ultimate court of appeal. It is not infallible, 
but is always to be obeyed. It decides, for each 
man, what assumptions, or premisses beyond 
proof, he can or ought to admit, and which they 
are that he must reject under penalty of being 
disloyal to the Truth as he perceives it. Only by 
its use can the certitudes be secured or maintained 


Photo by Barraud 


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Cardinal Newman, 1888. 


THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 155 


which give to nations as to individuals a stable 
character, consistency in action, success in life. 
These are real assents, and perhaps as rare as they 
are powerful. 

““ They create,” says Newman in a passage that 
may fittingly close this chapter, “heroes and 
saints, great leaders, statesmen, preachers and 
reformers, the pioneers of discovery in science, 
visionaries, fanatics, knight-errants, demagogues, 
and adventurers. They have given to the world 
men of one idea, of immense energy, of adaman- 
tine will, of revolutionary power. They kindle 
sympathies between man and man, and knit to- 
gether the innumerable units which constitute a 
State and a nation. They become the principle 
of its political existence; they impart to it homo- 
geneity of thought and fellowship of purpose. 
They have given form to the medieval theocracy 
and to the Mahometan superstition; they are now 
the life both of ‘ Holy Russia,’ and of that free- 
dom of speech and action which is the special boast 
of Englishmen.” 


CHAPTER VI 
DREAM OF GERONTIUS 


In April, 1863, Newman, who was now to be 
a hermit in his Oratory at Edgbaston till the end 
came, remarked in one of his letters—‘‘ I myself, 
though I have a fixed place to live in, and so far 
have a great blessing, am in the most strange way 
cut off from other people. Out of sight, out of 
mind, I suppose; but so it is that I know nothing 
of how things are going on, what there is to do, 
and who is doing it.’”’ Most strange, did not the 
same note of isolation sound in the lives of great 
men from old time. He was the one Catholic 
who understood his country, who handled its 
prose as Shakespeare handled its verse, and whose 
devotion to creed and dogma found expression in 
undying eloquence. But the lesser spirits, which 
could not see with his penetration, suspected and 
thwarted him. Then he took England with the 
“most beautiful of all biographies,” and if the 
crowd were not converted to his opinions, they 
became aware that a second Dante or St. John was 


DREAM OF GERONTIUS 157 


dwelling among them. He had still, however, to 
win his own. 

Of the Grammar he said, “‘ it is my last work.” 
Composed while he felt the estrangement that 
had sprung up between himself and the party in 
power, it came out in 1870, the year of the 
Vatican Council. Newman had been invited to 
Rome, and had declined. His letter, surrepti- 
tiously published, denouncing an “ insolent and 
aggressive faction,’ made no little stir. But, 
much as he lamented the loss of Dollinger and 
those who went off into the Old-Catholic move- 
ment, it would be mistaking him altogether if we 
supposed that their line of conduct had his ap- 
proval. He could no more submit Revelation to 
the test of an autonomous criticism than to any 
other form in which private judgment should have 
the last word. Facts, of course, were facts; but 
the Church exercised in regard to history the same 
sort of jurisdiction, under Providence, which the 
illative sense possessed in concrete questions gen- 
erally. ‘This was, in terms, a principle denied at 
Munich. Newman, in accepting the Vatican De- 
crees, could therefore appeal not only to earlier 
affirmations couched in splendid rhetoric, but to his 
life-long assumptions or first principles. He has 
shown as much convincingly in the Letter to the 


Duke of Norfolk, which was a reply to W. E. 


158 NEWMAN 


Gladstone’s Vaticanism, in 1875, and which closed 
a career of religious polemics dating from 1833. 

He considered that the statesman did not in- 
terpret Papal documents according to their true 
sense; ‘‘ theological language,’’ he said, “‘ is scien- 
tific, and cannot be understood without a knowl- 
edge of long precedent and tradition, nor without 
the comments of theologians. Such comments 
time alone can give us.’’ He could not assent to 
the contention that Rome had “ repudiated mod- 
ern thought and ancient history.’”’ The Vatican 
dogma seemed to him an instance of development, 
genuine and no corruption, from ideas which had 
always governed the Papacy—a view which 
Renan, lecturing some years afterwards in Lang- 
ham Place, did more than insinuate, though he 
could not accept the Council. 

Newman, on his part, was not sorry that an 
expostulation such as Gladstone’s should recall 
extreme partisans to the difficulties and duties 
which they were overlooking. “ It is but a small 
thing,” he said once, ‘‘ to gain the praise of those 
who agree with ourselves.” He was never in love 
with extremes; his maxim had always been “ Live 
and let live’; this was his ‘“‘ very nature,” as he 
told Ambrose Phillips (the Eustace Lyle of Con- 
ingsby) when writing on another subject, that of 
Gothic architecture, in 1848. “It is no new 


DREAM OF GERONTIUS 159 


thing with me to feel little sympathy with parties, 
or extreme opinions, of any kind. I ever felt it 
in the English Church.” He had not quitted the 
Via Media which, in Aristotle, was the path of 
good sense; he knew that to most men, however 
well-intentioned, religion is a yoke or a burden. 
He was quite willing, for their sake, to practise a 
“wise and gentle minimism,” in expounding the 
credenda of his Church; but this raised him up 
enemies, who deemed it almost a betrayal. 

Nevertheless, times were changing. On Feb- 
ruary 7, 1878, Pius IX died. He had taken 
kindly to Newman at first, but was afterwards 
drawn away from him by the letters which Dr. 
Manning addressed to the Vatican, and perhaps 
not softened by the Oratorian’s lofty reticence. 
Another Pope reigned now. Leo XIII had also 
known what it was to spend his years in isolation, 
forgotten at Perugia, as Newman at Edgbaston. 
And he, too, was moderate in language, concilia- 
tory by disposition, a classical scholar, an elegant 
writer. He called the great Englishman up to 
the Sacred College; and on May 12, 1879, John 
Henry Newman was made the Cardinal of St. 
George. 

This unexpected and picturesque event was the 
crown set on a life, prolonged beyond its term, 
one would say, that all might do it homage. 


160 NEWMAN 


Oxford led the way. His first college, Trinity, 
named him in 1878 honorary Fellow. He went 
back, as from an exile of thirty-three years, dined 
in academical robes at the high table, and once 
more preached, though not in St. Mary’s. Month 
by month he was bringing out his uniform edition, 
with notes that carry on a singular dialogue, in 
which the Catholic Newman replies to the Trac- 
tarian, correcting or instructing him, for it was the 
irony of his temperament that he must convert 
himself. He finished his translation of St. 
Athanasius. He delivered an opinion, cautiously 
framed, on the inspiration of Scripture, moved 
thereto indirectly by Renan’s Souvenirs, which he 
did not read and was not discussing. At home 
he meditated, pen in hand, leaving a volume of 
prayers conceived with exquisite tenderness, sim- 
ple as a child’s thoughts, not rich and stately like 
those of Bishop Andrewes, which he had long ago 
at Oxford turned into an English that rivals their 
Greek. He was frequently consulted, by strangers 
also, and made them welcome. It has been said 
that he did not so much answer their questions as 
his own—the solitary thinker who saw what they 
could not see, and whose wisdom had grown to 
be reminiscence. That is likely enough. To the 
last he was an Oxford scholar of 1830, clerical 
Fellow of Oriel, not German, or modern, or scien- 


DREAM OF GERONTIUS 161 


tific. or a metaphysician of any sect. His beauti- 
ful modesty was a compliment which he paid to 
the truth and his own mind. It gave him an in- 
comparable charm; it assigned a limit within which 
he had no equal. 

But now he might say with Prospero— 


When I have required 
Some heavenly music, which even now I do, 
To work mine end upon their senses that 
This airy charm is for, I’]l break my staff. 


“T have always held,” he wrote to a friend in 
1884, ‘that thought was instantaneous—that it 
takes no time—and now that doctrine is confirmed 
to me, when I want a subtle shorthand to record 
what otherwise, like a flash of lightning, goes as 
rapidly as it comes.’”’ At length, some three years 
later, the staff is broken: ‘‘ J am too old to write; 
I cannot hold the pen,” he said, and his tremulous 
fingers laid it down for ever. 

But, for a long while, every third thought had 
been his grave. In 1865, on the death of a dear 
friend, he had cast his musings into the form of a 
dramatic poem, but was not satisfied with it, and 
flung the manuscript aside. By good hap one saw 
it that had eyes, rescued its pages from the dark, 
and persuaded him to let others read it. The 
poem thus perilously nigh to destruction proved 
to be The Dream of Gerontius. 


162 NEWMAN 


Among his minor pieces, one, entitled ‘“ Wait- 
ing for the Morning,” might serve as an over- 
ture to the grand Requiem which, like his beloved 
Mozart, the poet-philosopher composed against 
his journey home. He writes, after Venerable 
Bede, of ‘‘ a meadow wherein the souls, not suffer- 
ing, were detained, as yet unmeet for the Beatific 
Vision.”” And thus he describes them— 


They are at rest : 
We may not stir the heaven otf their repose 
With loud-voiced grief, or passionate request, 
Or selfish plaint for those 
Who in the mountain-grots of Eden ,ie, 
And hear the fourfold river, as it hurries by. 


They hear it sweep 
In distance down the dark and savage vale ; 
But they at eddying pool or current deep 
Shall never more grow pale ; 
They hear, and meekly muse, as fain to know 
How long untired, unspent, that giant stream shall flow. 


When he entered into the full circle of Catholic 
ideas, the Paradise became a “ golden prison,” 
still to be desired, but austere as the shadow of 
suffering fell over it, and the Dirge chanted its 
lessons from Job. The Dream is a rare poetic 
rendering into English verse of that high ritual 
which, from the death-bed to the Mass of Suppli- 
cation, encompasses the faithful soul. It pierces, 


DREAM OF GERONTIUS 163 


indeed, beyond the veil, but in strict accordance 
or analogy with what every Catholic holds to be 
there. Hence we shall best interpret its meaning 
if we liken it, not to Milton, whose supernatural 
worlds are his peculiar device, founded upon 
heathen rather than Christian tradition; nor to 
Dante, who mingles history and landscape from his 
time and travels in the solemn sweet Purgatorio 
which remains his masterpiece; but to Calderon’s 
Autos Sacramentales, at once an allegory and an 
act of faith. 

This ‘‘ Dream ”’ is a true and vivid example of 
what Berkeley intended, when he represented the 
whole world as shown to the spirit, though not 
existing outside it, and on that account the more 
real. It has no local habitation; we do not once 
think, in reading it, of the Dantean cosmography. 
It takes place where the soul is, and the Angels, 
where we love and suffer. But the solid frame of 
things, as it lately appeared, is no more. Alone 
the spirit utters its beliefs, while it seems falling 
into the abyss; alone, amid litanies and absolu- 
tions, it passes away, the priest reciting most 
musically his great anthem, “‘ Go forth upon thy 
journey, Christian soul! ”’ 

From this moment whatsoever happens can only 
be in “‘ dreams that are true, yet enigmatical.”’ 


The Guardian Angel who holds an office of in- 


164 NEWMAN 


terpreter, as Virgil to Dante, tells Gerontius that 
he lives now in “a world of signs and types, the 
presentation of most holy truths, living and 
strong’; but by condescendence merely, lest so 
stern a solitude should load and break his being, 
for as disembodied he has by right no converse 
with aught else beside himself. It is the philoso- 
phy of St. Thomas Aquinas moulded into lines of 
Shakespearean weight and precision. 

A comment on this dialogue, so beautiful in its 
idea, so feelingly expressed, may be found in the 
pages where St. Cyprian endeavours to win over 
Callista from her bright Hellenic religion, centred 
and summed up as it was in a world of fading 
charms. ‘The situation is different, for Callista 
did not then love the “‘ First and only Fair”; it 
is the contrary of that in the Dream; but the saint 
pleads as the angel interprets; and the argument 
is equally subduing. Idealism here passes into 
something higher—the soul affirms its enduring 
reality, compared with which what are all the 
shows of matter and sense but air-drawn pictures, 
to be blown away by the first breath of wind? 

Yet, even here, it is not the same imagery for 
all. A mighty painter would have chosen lines 
and colours; the musician prefers sounds as less 
material; he proceeds by harmonies and disso- 
nances. The Angel chants a hymn of triumph; 


DREAM OF GERONTIUS 165 


a “fierce hubbub” warns that the demon-throng 
are hovering round the Judgment-seat. “It is 
the restless panting of their being ” which breaks 
out in stanzas, uncouth, turbulent, but preter- 
human, as grim as in medieval mysteries, and as 
awe-inspiring. These are not the great lords who 
debate in golden Pandemonium; they have for- 
feited the dignity which Milton clad in verse of 
majestic splendour; much more do they resemble 
earth-powers, elemental and inchoate, as if their 
high thought had sunk down to blind opposition, 
their glance of fire been quenched in a medium 
not its own. 

Both these conceptions have called forth a 
poetry so vast and full of terror that we know not 
how to choose between them. But in The Dream 
of Gerontius we seem to catch echoes or flying 
reminiscences from the A‘schylean chorus, and to 
hear the Furies who went in chase of Orestes like 
hounds. To the lofty grave tragedian as to the 
Catholic mystic, these were not so much “ ma- 
chinery,” fictions devised to startle an audience, 
but the sternest truth of fact, real in a way which 
transcended seeming, beyond Nature yet ever 
mingling with it. As the stage in Athens was an 
altar, the theatre of Dionysus a church, so this 
mystery-play is, to speak largely, a sacrament, and 
its figures are masks for divine or demonic pow- 


166 NEWMAN 


ers. It belongs not to literature—that mere thing 
too often of words and surfaces—but to the lit- 
urgy, as if an inspired lection, chanted by answer- 
ing choirs, under a sacred roof. 

In the Catholic Sermons, which we have recog- 
nized as excelling those of Oxford in strength, 
swiftness of impression, and a quickened pulse, 
there is one score—as musicians term it—not 
less moving, nay, with a sense of colour added 
which to certain minds will be more so, than the 
gloomy strophes that in Gerontius body forth 
the “ harrowing of Hell.” ‘‘ Impossible, I a lost 
soul!’ cries the condemned; “I separated from 
hope and from peace for ever! It is not I of 
whom the Judge so spake! There is a mistake 
somewhere; Christ, Saviour, hold Thy hand— 
one minute to explain it! My name is Demas; 
I am but Demas, not Judas, or Nicolas, or Alex- 
ander, or Philetus, or Diotrephes.”’ He argues 
with the horrible fiend: ‘“‘ I am a man, and not 
such as thou! I am not food for thee, or sport 
for thee! I never was in hell as thou, I have not 
on me the smell of fire or the taint of the charnel- 
house!” And then, characteristically, “ I know 
what human feelings are; I have been taught 
religion; I have had a conscience; I have a cul- 
tivated mind; I am well versed in science and art; 
I have been refined by literature; I have had an 


DREAM OF GERONTIUS 167 


eye for the beauties of nature; I am a philosopher, 
or a poet, or a shrewd observer of men, or a states- 
man, or an orator, or a man of wit and humour. 
Nay, lama Catholic . . . soI defy thee, and 
abjure thee, O enemy of man!” 

Here we perceive what is meant by “ strong 
imagination,” of which in his surpassing rhetoric 
Theseus, in Shakespeare, says the poet is “all 
compact.” It apprehends not joy and pain with- 
out a bringer of them, and is figurative because it 
seizes on a hidden reality, otherwise not to be 
detained. Newman, letting go the outward, has 
taken man’s soul for his stage; the persons of the 
drama live within it, throb to its vibrations, and 
surge up into light from its unfathomable deeps, 
in such degree made concrete as itself is creative, 
whether of good or evil. 

But in the Dream we hear the tumult as a 
far-off thunder; and on the spirit’s apprehension 
fall more joyful strains as it draws near to the 
House of Judgment. One choir of ‘Angelicals 
opens the symphony, another replies; for here are 
no temples and palaces material, but— 


Cornice, or frieze, or balustrade, or stair, 
The very pavement is made up of life— 

Of holy, blessed, and immortal beings, 

Who hymn their Maker’s praise continually. 


168 NEWMAN 


They sing of creation, fall, redemption, and the 
soul’s approaching agony, which from the face of 
the Incarnate God shall smite it with a keen and 
subtle pain. The Guardian Spirit speaks— 


There is a pleading in His pensive eyes 
Will pierce thee to the quick and trouble thee, 
And thou wilt hate and loathe thyself. 


Its “‘ veriest, sharpest purgatory” will be the 
longing, yet the shame; and while the lintels of 
the Presence-gate are vibrating with melody, and 
the entrance is passed, come floating up the voices 
that it had left on earth, interceding; the Angel 
of Christ’s agony, “ lone in that garden shade, be- 
dewed with blood,” murmurs, as in some litany 
of the Holy Name, its last petitions—all in a 
moment the soul escapes, 


And, with the intemperate energy of love, 
Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel. 


But ere it reach them, fire has come forth from 
that sanctity; and now it lies passive and still, con- 
sumed yet quickened. It breathes one touching 
prayer :— 
Take me away, and in the lowest deep, 
There let me be, 


And there in hope the lone night watches keep 
Told out for me. 


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DREAM OF GERONTIUS 169 


The golden prison opens its gates; the great 
powers, Angels of Purgatory, receive their charge 
from its guardian, a dearly ransomed soul; the 
spirits which are its brethren recite that most 
subduing of Psalms, ‘“‘ Lord, Thou hast been our 
refuge in every generation,” with its pathetic 
hope and not unmixed sadness; the waters close 
upon him who must go down deep into them; and 
above his form as it sinks into the dim distance 
the Angel speaks farewell— 


Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here, 
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow. 


Such was the answer given at length to ‘‘ Lead, 

indly Light ”—a revelation of the Unseen, se- 
vere yet tender, demanding an heroic service, but 
to One who was entirely human, the simple Chris- 
tian truth, set in a mystery almost scenic, that it 
might be the more taking. 

During the last ten years of his life, Cardinal 
Newman, “lone but not forlorn,” seemed to 
abide in this mid-region of prayer, hope, peni- 
tence, gentle to all who visited him, but apart, 
and, though not quite silent, ever less disposed to 
speak. There is a portrait of him in his scarlet 
which almost renders on those imperial features 
a sleeping smile; what the American Lowell 


170 NEWMAN 


charmingly described as his gracious senescence 
became a possession of which England was proud. 
His mind gave no signs of ageing; serene and 
luminous, all it asked to be active as ever was that 
the worn-out instruments by which it wrought 
should be renewed; and this, we remember, was 
Goethe’s argument for immortality. The dying 
Prospero did not suffer; he fell on sleep and passed 
away without a pang, without parade of death and 
its sable trappings. The line of Sophocles became 
his departure well— 


Slight strokes do bring the aged frame to rest. 


It was August 11, 1890, late in the evening. To 
many there seemed “a white star extinguished ” 
in their mental horizon, a place vacant which no 
other then alive could fill. Public mourning, and, 
what is rare indeed when a man of ninety dies, 
private grief, took up their parable, joined hands 
over the grave at Rednall in which this perfect 
friend was laid by his brother in religion, Ambrose 
St. John. For the motto on his cardinal’s shield 
Newman had adopted a sentence from St. Francis 
de Sales’ letters, ‘“‘ Cor ad cor loquitur,” heart 
speaketh unto heart. For his epitaph he chose 
words, the nearest form of which occurs in Loss 
and Gain, a volume wherein he consigned many 
of his dearest thoughts, ‘‘ Ex umbris et imaginibus 


DREAM OF GERONTIUS 171 


in veritatem ’—as Charles Reding expresses it, 
“Coming out of shadows into realities.” These 
great sayings indicate a temperament and a phi- 
losophy, which together made of John Henry 
Newman all that he became. 


CHAPTER VII 
THE MAN OF LETTERS 


By this time we have learned something not 
only of Newman’s intimate convictions, but of the 
raiment in which he dressed them. Yet we can- 
not end without speaking of him more distinctly 
as a man of letters. English critics, unlike the 
French, are scarcely permitted in books to handle 
as they ought questions which affect style and lan- 
guage. ‘There is thought to be a pedantry in such 
minute investigations, whereas, until they are at- 
tempted, no proper estimate can be formed of a 
writer’s place in literature. A volume might well 
be given to the sources from which this great 
scholar drew, the laws of composition to which he 
submitted, the variations in his manner according 
to the subject dealt with, his affinities, repulsions, 
triumphs, failures, and limits, strictly as an author, 
irrespective of his theme. Little as we can un- 
dertake it within our dwindling borders, at least 
we may sketch the task to be left for happier 
students. 

We may begin with a letter, dated April, 1869, 


172 


THE MAN OF LETTERS 173 


in which Newman, then engaged on his Grammar 
of Assent, confesses with delightful frankness, “ I 
have been obliged to take great pains with every- 
thing I have written, and I often write chapters 
over and over again, besides innumerable correc- 
tions and interlinear additions. I am not stating 
this as a merit, only that some persons write their 
best first, and I very seldom do.” He proceeds, 
“however, I may truly say that I never have been 
in the practice since I was a boy of attempting to 
write well, or to form an elegant style. I think I 
never have written for writing’s sake; but my one 
and single desire and aim has been to do what is 
so difficult, viz. to express clearly and exactly my 
meaning.” As to patterns for imitation, he tells 
his correspondent, ‘‘the only master of style I 
have ever had . . . is Cicero. I think I owea 
great deal to him, and as far as I know to no one 
elses” 

Every day Newman made a point of translating 
one English sentence into Latin. He wrote Latin 
with ease and idiomatically; nor can we doubt his 
indebtedness to Cicero. But we have quoted the 
passage where he speaks of imitating Johnson, 
Gibbon, and Addison, while we have only to turn 
over his Anglican pages and we shall find in them 
frequent echoes of Hooker, Taylor, and the 
Church Prayer Book. Again, they are steeped in 


174 NEWMAN 


reminiscences of the English Bible, as we might 
expect from his familiarity with it in every part. 
And many of the Greek plays as well as Thucyd- 
ides and Herodotus, contributed to form the es- 
sentially classical mould into which his composi- 
tions are cast, early and late. Shakespeare, too, 
we have seen, was his father’s favourite reading. 
All these elements must be taken into account. 
Dating, then, from Cicero, Newman belongs 
to the central tradition of European prose which, 
since Lysias and the Greek orators made it cur- 
rent, is good coin in all our dialects. He exhibits 
the “copious, majestic, unmixed flow of lan- 
guage,” that he admires in his prototype. ‘True, 
Attic eloquence was plain and simple, as compared 
with this Latin; nevertheless, from Athens Cicero 
derived a style, perspicuous because it was full, 
rich that it might be found equal to emergencies, 
grave and dignified as answering to the pride of 
place which made Consul Romanus a title loftier 
than the Great King’s. ‘‘ What Livy, and much 
more Tacitus, have gained in energy, they have 
lost in lucidity and elegance,” so thought Newman 
when he published his essay on Marcus Tullius. 
He repeated and enforced the judgment, many 
years later, from a different point of view; 
“Neither Livy, nor Tacitus, nor Terence, nor 
Seneca, nor Pliny, nor Quinctilian,” he said, “ is 


THE MAN OF LETTERS 175 


an adequate spokesman for the Imperial City. 
They write Latin; Cicero writes Roman.” 

Whenever we open Newman, we are not far, 
it would appear, from this Queen of the World. 
Almost one had termed him a Latin classic, and 
on more serious grounds than his tasteful pro- 
logues to the comedies of Terence. He is Latin 
by the structure of sentence and period; by the 
rhythm which his ear, fastidiously keen, demands; 
by his leisurely rhetoric, and senatorial grace, and 
instant authority. But it is Roman Latin. He 
disdains the archaic and the provincial; he has too 
much sense to be affected; he is too serious for the 
vain exhibition of a virtuoso—an Isocrates or a 
Euphues; too sure of himself to employ any but 
the words which men use in their daily talk. His 
choice, like Macaulay’s, does not range outside 
Johnson. He can be idiomatic in lectures to a 
mixed gathering; brief, but not sententious; to 
the point, yet hardly ever epigrammatic; ironical 
or humorous in a natural way, without quitting 
his air of reserve. He is never unstudied, but just 
as little self-conscious, for he desires to instruct or 
to persuade, not to show off what literary art can 
achieve. For literature, as an accomplishment, he 
cares not at all. 

The French critic, M. Dimnet, who so well 
understands him, knows only of Bossuet among 


176 NEWMAN 


great modern writers to be set beside Newman in 
this absolute disdain for the praise of excellence. 
It does not seem that either expected their writings 
to go down beyond their own time. Bossuet left 
his works at the mercy of accidents; Newman 
wrote as occasion served, seldom read what he 
published after he had corrected his proofsheets, 
and, as he naively remarks, was not well up in it. 
He had a message to deliver, and he might say, 
“ T believe, therefore I have spoken”; but he was 
no more of a dilettante than was Carlyle. 

Academic he certainly was, teaching in the form 
of lecture, as from a chair to those who would 
listen. He is the opposite of Seneca; he must 
expound, elucidate, place his subject in various 
lights, resolve difficulties; he is a rhetorician. Is 
he also an artist? Yes, if we consider his choice 
and easy sentences; his love of order in words; 
not so, perhaps, when a volume is to be wrought 
out of one single topic, as in the Development or 
the Grammar. He has bequeathed to us no work, 
except Gerontius, which does not finish somewhat 
abruptly. His felicities of diction, numerous in 
every chapter he published, have led Dean Church 
to a comparison with French prose; but there is 
nothing French in Newman, although his philoso- 
phy lies at no great distance from Pascal. 

Nor has he marked affinities with English writ- 


THE MAN OF LETTERS 177 


ers of his day. He is strikingly different from 
Macaulay, whose eloquence betrays the fury, as it 
is annealed in the fire, of the Western Celt. He 
composes in a language that seems tame when we 
read Carlyle’s epic of the Revolution; and, in fact, 
it is the style of Oxford, not of Ecclefechan. To 
Ruskin, who deliberately built up a monument, 
stately as the palace of Kubla Khan, he is a con- 
trast for the very reason that he does not handle 
words as if they were settings in architecture or 
colours on a palette; rather, he would look upon 
them as transparencies which let his meaning 
through. He is more like De Quincey, but again 
no player upon the organ for the sake of its music; 
and that which is common to both is the literary 
tradition of the eighteenth century, enhanced by a 
power to which abstract and concrete yielded in 
almost equal degree. 

Like De Quincey, too, Newman could tell the 
story of his own life, but hardly any other. He 
was short-sighted, and did not see people very: 
clearly; absorbed in thought, he knew their mo- 
tives better than their features; the drama of life 
was to him a dialogue, not a scene. As in style 
he is polished and uniform, without deep or bold 
variations, so his sketches from history, which we 
read again and again, are not portraits such as 
Gibbon would paint; they do not fix the place be- 


178 NEWMAN 


fore us, or give the local colour. There is even 
a tendency in them to fuse together different 
periods—the Athens of St. Gregory and St. Basil 
with the Athens of Cicero or that of Pericles; the 
Rome of St. Philip Neri with Medicean Florence. 
But this may be an illusion of perspective in such 
brief studies. 

Newman could certainly draw the characters 
which he discriminates so finely. His romances, 
to give them a name which they do not invite, 
were byplays of genius; they discover a talent for 
description, dialogue, and clear outlines, needing 
only to be cultivated. Their persons are not 
shadows. In Loss and Gain, Sheffield, the in- 
‘cipient sceptic, is drawn with power. In Callista 
the heroine herself, though no more than a pastel, 
if you will be exacting, has delightful traits; 
Jucundus the Epicurean lives and moralizes; and 
Juba, the demoniac, if preterhuman, is real. But 
we may treat these figures as designedly symbolic, 
and they have their charm. Had he taken up the 
art, Newman could have won distinction as a 
novelist. And his contributions to Church history, 
though occasional, are pages perfect in style, in 
matter select, and to the general reader as stimu- 
lating as instructive, which is no small praise. He 
resuscitated the Church of the Fathers by making 
it present in imagination to a supercilious age, and 


THE MAN OF LETTERS 179 


he broke the barrier which had long divided eccle- 
siastical from secular story, paving the way to such 
a method as, in Harnack or Duchesne, is now lit- 
erally building up for us the vanished world of the 
first Christian centuries. 

With so prompt and intense an intellect at his 
call, there was no subject, outside purely technical 
criticism, which Newman could not have mastered. 
He was versatility itself in potentia, as the school- 
men have it. On the other hand, he never read 
for reading sake; he was either incurious or de- 
tached on principle from the pursuit of beauties 
in literature. By instinct a Platonist, seldom if 
ever does he quote from Plato; it is hardly prob- 
able that he knew much of the divine Athenian 
beyond the Protagoras or Gorgias. He read with 
an end in view. His singularly practical talent, 
which “ made a bolt of any tree,” led him to take 
Oxford as he found it, without exploring new 
regions; and so we must explain his living all 
through the crises of German thought, content 
with his own garden. | 

In like manner he did not enter into, and he 
would not observe at first hand, the movement of 
Democracy. As an Oxford man sprung from the 
middle class, he disliked and feared it, while he 
had a presentiment that the Church would be cast 
off by the State and driven to rely on the People. 


180 NEWMAN 


It is said that he made analyses of political con- 
stitutions, modern as well as ancient. No trace 
of that labour can be followed in his books, ex- 
cept where he parallels the British to the Attic 
State, in Who’s to Blame?—a piece on the 
Crimean War, not less brilliant than Thackeray’s 
Four Georges—and in his philosophical reflections 
on the Turks. We may question if he had read 
Montesquieu; he was surely not acquainted with 
Rousseau; and he remained to the last an old-fash- 
ioned Englishman, not so much Whig or Tory as 
insular and even somewhat prejudiced. 

We smile at these things; all the more if there 
was scarcely in the veins of our great genius one 
drop of English blood. He might boast, at all 
events, what Tertullian styles the ‘‘ consanguinity 
of doctrine,” for his views are English-Hebrew, 
and, in the long run, his method is not Greek. 
This should be clearly understood. Drawing out 
refined trains of argument, subtle in exposition, 
he seems to wield a dialectic borrowed from the 
Porch or the Academy; but it is not so. The 
Greek moves from reason to reason; Newman 
goes by experience and authority. They are his 
own thoughts, but they contemplate things, the 
concrete, passing over chasms which every Hel- 
lenic philosopher would have deemed it his duty 
to fill up. Newman’s assumptions are his life; 


THE MAN OF LETTERS 181 


he affirms them because he cannot exist without 
them. But if any one calls them in question, he 
turns away to those who affirm like himself. We 
cannot imagine a Greek declining the combat of 
first principles, not even Aristotle, who is more 
properly a man of science than a metaphysician. 
Hence the remarkable admission in Newman’s 
letter above quoted: ‘‘ When I have read over a 
passage which I had written a few days before, 
I have found it so obscure to myself that I have 
either put it altogether aside or fiercely corrected 
it; but I don’t get any better for practice. I am 
as much obliged to correct and rewrite as I was 
thirty years ago.” 

Yes, “‘system nearly precludes freedom, and 
depth almost implies obscurity.”” But still more 
does the influence of what is now known as the 
Unconscious tell on a mind which could hardly 
bear to scrutinize the sacred foundations of 
thought. System is often shallow; as it was ex- 
tant in Paley and the evidence-writers it seemed 
irreverent. An epigrammatist observes that “to 
Newman his own nature was a revelation which 
he called Conscience.”” No doubt, he found in 
himself tokens of an order not only ethical but 
holy, and he dreaded tampering with it. ‘* Con- 
science,” he declared, ‘‘ is the aboriginal Vicar of 
Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch 


182 NEWMAN 


in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and 
anathemas.” Faith had its reserves, love was 
reticent; never would this true Platonist have 
ventured on writing the Symposium in which the 
Master discourses with such unconcerned elo- 
quence of Eros, the earthly and the heavenly. 
There is a deep silence in Newman’s works on 
the hidden springs of life as of thought. He is 
Alexandrian, a mystic whose belief tempers, 
when it does not forbid, his utterance, and his 
pages are composed in the forecourt of the 
Temple. 

Coming down from these heights, we are put in 
mind of Fénelon, whom the Tractarian resembles 
in his fortunes, his natural disposition, his quality 
as a writer, and his spiritual affinities. Under a 
winning smile both are severe; affectionate, and 
not afraid to show their affection, they stand in- 
wardly aloof; their submission is a victory, their 
recantation a triumph; they are continually por- 
traying themselves, yet do not cease to be modest; 
they have the energy of genius, and are described 
as feminine because they meet blows with argu- 
ment, rudeness with pathos, and possess the 
divine gift of tears. They charm strangers, but 
leave in minds unsympathetic a suspicion that 
these sentiments are too beautiful to be true. 
They feel and express great changes in the world’s 


Cardinal Newman. 


From a photograph taken by Father Anthony Pollen in the summer of 1889 
Reproduced by kind permission of the Catholic Truth Society 


THE MAN OF LETTERS 183 


tides; they move in advance of their contem- 
poraries; they denote, were it even by reaction, 
the breaking up of an ancient order, and they in 
turn are marked out as heralds of revolution. 
They write, not according to rule, abundantly, as 
they talk persuasively; without show, but like 
men who have known the best books, and not 
ex cathedra, however assured that when they open 
their lips others must listen. ‘They never quite 
succeed with persons in high places, for they carry 
with them a sovereign rank. They give up, or 
do not value, the prizes of ambition; their habits 
are simple; in seclusion or in exile they hold, as 
it were, a court to which pilgrims make their way; 
and their friends worship them, public fame can- 
onizes them; still they abide at a lofty altitude, 
not popular, however celebrated, bearing on their 
brows a sign which is like a star, the perennial 
raying forth of a spirit which, in its form and 
pressure, had no second. 

Thus, at last, Newman fulfils his own definition 
of a great author. Surely “his aim is to give 
forth what he has within him; and from his very 
earnestness it comes to pass that, whatever be the 
splendour of his diction or the harmony of his 
periods, he has with him the charm of an incom- 
municable simplicity. Whatever be his subject, 
high or low, he treats it suitably and for its own 


184 NEWMAN 


sake. His page is the lucid mirror of his mind 
and life— 


Quo fit, ut omnis 
Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella 
Vita senis. 


He writes passionately, because he feels keenly; 
forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too 
clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose; 
he can analyse his subject, and therefore he is rich; 
he embraces it as a whole, and in its parts, and 
therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, 
and therefore he is luminous. When his imagina- 
tion wells up, it overflows in ornament; when his 
heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He 
always has the right word for the right idea, and 
never a word too much. If he is brief, it is be- 
cause few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, 
still each word has its mark, and aids, not em- 
barrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He 
expresses what all feel, but all cannot say; and his 
sayings pass into proverbs among his people, and 
his phrases become household words and idioms of 
their daily speech, which is tessellated with the 
rich fragments of his language, as we see in for- 
eign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked 
into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.” 

Nor is it unlikely that opinion will one day 


THE MAN OF LETTERS 185 


ascribe to him, as in the Middle Ages it ascribed 
to Virgil, the qualities of a prophet or magician. 
For of Newman also we may say that “‘ his single 
words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, give 
utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that 
pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, 
which is the experience of her children in every 
time.” 


CHAPTER VIII 
NEWMAN’S PLACE IN HISTORY 


WHEN we ask ourselves what place will be 
assigned at last to Newman, whether in the scale 
of English or of European letters, we are met by 
more than common difficulties. As we have seen, 
he was before all things a preacher and teacher; 
he never had any ambition to shine in literature 
for its own sake; if he became “‘ the leading author 
of a school,” it was that religion, not learning, or 
art or style, as such, might gain the benefit. 
Almost as repugnant to our feelings would be the 
thought of St. Paul, contemplated chiefly or ex- 
clusively in his function of a writer, as that of the 
Oxford apostle who, when he studied, was pre- 
paring to defend Christian truth, and, when he 
published, never could lose out of sight edification 
as his one object. He had, indeed, learnt from 
the example of Origen and the Fathers how dogma 
might be upheld and its opponents overthrown by 
weapons borrowed in the world’s arsenal. Yet he 
was profoundly convinced that literature is one 


thing, Christianity another; that ‘‘ the habitat of 
186 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 187 


the natural gifts is the natural man”’; and that 
“not till the whole human race is made new will 
its literature be true and pure.” Literature, he 
said, stands related to man as science stands to 
nature; it his biography, told by himself. And it 
cannot be made into an edifying story. 

Hence, he went on to conclude, “ you cannot 
have a Christian Literature,” if you mean in fact 
a study of human nature. And as is the subject, 
such is the instrument by which it must be de- 
lineated. Various great critics, among whom 
Carlyle is notable, have insisted that writers of 
genius cannot be themselves base at heart. New- 
man would have replied by distinguishing between 
moral excellence, mental depth, and the gift of ex- 
pression. He would have taken a farther step. 
The Bible, so he argued, is “ no picture of life’; 
it “‘ gives us little insight into the fertile develop- 
ments of mind; it has no terms in its vocabulary 
to express with exactness the intellect and its sepa- 
rate faculties; it knows nothing of genius, wit, 
invention, presence of mind, resource. It does not 
discourse of empire, commerce, enterprise, learn- 
ing, philosophy and the fine arts.” In other words 
the Old Testament is, pre-eminently, not Greek; 
and even the New is in texture and spirit Hebrew. 
Let these comments be somewhat exaggerated— 
for, certainly, the Bible has much to say of empire 


188 NEWMAN 


and political developments, as it looks forward in 
the Prophets to an era when social righteousness 
shall prevail—there is truth enough in them to 
justify and explain Newman’s handling of litera- 
ture as not an end but a means, with undeviating 
reference to a scope outside it, and thus not chiefly 
as a liberal art, but for practice and utility. 

This, too, will have been the reason why he was, 
though versatile to a surprising degree, not curi- 
ous about books or interested in famous modern 
authors, or given to criticism of those whom he 
admired, except as so delicate a taste would be, in- 
stinctively. The lust of knowledge, libido sciendi, 
had played a melancholy part in Adam’s fall. 
There was a lust of natural beauty in speech and 
thought not more innocent, which would corrupt 
the ethical temper, excuse vices that do not sin 
against good manners, because they “ have lost 
half their evil by losing all their grossness,” and 
substitute for the art of life, so painful and diffi- 
cult, the life of art, or at best the religion of phi- 
losophy. 

It is a forgotten writer, Lord Shaftesbury, 
whom in his Dublin Lectures Newman sets up for 
animadversion as embodying this superficial but 
dangerous idea. The example is obsolete; not so 
the doctrine. As regards conduct it has been 
seductively painted by Matthew Arnold, in whose 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 189 


judgment culture—which is the right human deal- 
ing with words written or spoken—becomes the 
born foe and predestined conqueror of anarchy. 
Culture has in view an ideal, and that nothing less 
than human perfection; but its means are, before 
all things, intellectual, “the best that has been 
thought and said in the world,” by men like the 
Greeks, who took for their province not revelation 
but reflection. Of such as these Newman tells 
us, “ they made their own minds their sanctuary, 
their own ideas their oracle, and conscience in 
morals was but parallel to genius in art, and wis- 
dom in philosophy.” 

Arnold defines the power he would commend as 
“an inward spiritual activity ”; it is plain, how- 
ever, that he never understands by the spirit that 
which Christians mean; for, in their language, 
lack of culture is no hindrance to its high develop- 
ment, and this he could not possibly grant. New- 
man, on the other hand, was unwearied in pointing 
out that, while the office of religion is elementary, 
dealing with individuals one by one, if it encour- 
aged the arts or advanced civilisation it did so for 
a purpose beyond them. Political convenience is 
not the standard of heavenly truth; neither is art, 
in any shape however beautiful, its sovereign. 

All this the preacher taught in his Oxford days 
with grave directness, and afterwards, when de- 


190 NEWMAN 


fending Rome against the imputations of a shal- 
low utilitarian school, with picturesque instances 
and an eloquence not untouched by passion; for 
it was a belief close to his heart that the civilized 
man cared only to seize on the lesser gifts of re- 
ligion, the “‘ order, tranquillity, popular content- 
ment, plenty, prosperity, advance in arts and 
sciences, literature, refinement, splendour,” in 
which he found his Elysium; but cared nothing 
for its message from another world. ‘ Why,” 
asks Newman, “ is the worship of reason so calm? 
Why was the religion of classic heathenism so joy- 
ous? Why is the framework of civilized society 
all so graceful and so correct? Why, on the other 
hand, is there so much of emotion, so much of con- 
flicting and alternating feeling, so much that is 
high, so much that is abased, in the devotion of 
Christianity? It is because the Christian, and the 
Christian alone, has a revelation.” 

But if he could not accept culture as a substi- 
tute for these powers of the world to come, still 
less would Newman have permitted to pass un- 
challenged a formula which, since his time, has 
been heard on many a lip, “ Art for art’s sake.” 
Confining ourselves to the art now in question— 
literature—we may throw some light on an ex- 
pression at once vague and pretentious, if we 
refer it to such an author as Gustave Flaubert, 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 191 


who patronized it in theory and spent years of 
toil in the effort to live up to it. Flaubert held 
that a genuine artist might handle any subject, 
however remote or opposed his feelings were to 
the persons and sentiments involved. Again, he 
should be required so entirely to conceal himself 
behind the arras of his invention that not a single 
fold of his private thoughts ought to appear, any 
more than if they did not exist. Finally, among 
the innumerable phrases by which an action or a 
character suffered itself to be described, there was 
always one unique and adequate, until the dis- 
covery of which the work remained a travesty or 
a torso. Literature, transformed by these rules 
to photographic realism, ceased to be an art, be- 
came a science, and, as if it were the study of rocks, 
earths, or chemical elements, needed no object out- 
side itself. It was exalted beyond good and evil, 
which, reduced to colours on its palette, might be 
employed in whatever proportion the experimental 
philosopher chose, without regard to public opin- 
ion or possible consequences. | 

Positions so anarchic Newman has refuted by 
anticipation. We remember his first great prin- 
ciple: literature is concerned not, as science, with 
things, but with thoughts. ‘‘ Science is universal, 
literature is personal; science uses words merely 
as symbols, but literature uses language in its full 


192 NEWMAN 


compass, as including phraseology, idiom, style, 
composition, rhythm, eloquence, and whatever 
other properties are included in it.’ Moreover 
—and here is a complete reply to Flaubert’s 
paradox—‘ while the many use language as they 
find it, the man of genius subjects it to his own 
purposes, and moulds it according to his own 
peculiarities. The throng and succession of ideas, 
thoughts, feelings, imaginations, aspirations which 
pass within him; the abstractions, the juxtaposi- 
tions, the comparisons, the discriminations, the 
conceptions which are so original in him; his 
views of external things, his judgments upon life, 
manners, and history; the exercises of his wit, of 
his humour, of his depth, of his sagacity; all these 
innumerable and incessant creations, the very pul- 
sation and throbbing of his intellect, does he image, 
to all does he give utterance, in a corresponding 
language, which is as multiform as this inward 
mental action itself, and analogous to it, the faith- 
ful expression of his intense personality, attending 
on his own inward world of thought as its very 
shadow; so that we might as well say that one 
man’s shadow is another’s as that the style of a 
really gifted mind can belong to any but himself.” 

Nor is it the style alone which stamps an 
original writer: he is first of all a mind, an im- 
agination, sui generis. There are those who regard 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 193 


composition as a trick and a trade; but, inquires 
Newman, “can they really think that Homer, or 
Pindar, or Shakespeare, or Dryden, or Walter 
Scott were accustomed to aim at diction for its 
own sake, instead of being inspired with their sub- 
ject, and pouring forth beautiful words because 
they had beautiful thoughts? ‘This is surely too 
great a paradox to be borne.”” No, we must look 
on the writer as inspired; ‘‘ his mental attitude and 
bearing, the beauty of his moral countenance ”’— 
mark this exquisite phrase worthy of Plato—‘ the 
force and keenness of his logic are imaged in the 
tenderness, or energy, or richness of his language.” 
And so the perfection he achieves in what he has 
undertaken is ‘‘ the monument, not so much of his 
skill as of his power.” 

We pause over this fine critical observation. 
Skill is an exercise of talent, as the distinction used 
to run; but power is a second name for genius, 
which itself implies personality and points to in- 
spiration. “The artist,’’ says Newman once 
more, “‘ has his great or rich visions before him; 
and his only aim is to bring out what he thinks or 
what he feels in a way adequate to the thing 
spoken of, and appropriate to the speaker.” It 
is a final stroke of irony, clenching this argument, 
that every word in it is applicable to Flaubert as 
to scarcely another of his time. Not only did he 


194 NEWMAN 


possess an incommunicable style, which those who 
have read him diligently will perceive in every 
sentence he has published, but his characters are 
sealed with their creator’s impress and bear too 
frequently the marks of his unkind handling. 
Flaubert lived in one period with men as highly 
endowed as Balzac, and George Sand was at that 
time writing some of her most eloquent stories. |, 
But there was neither man nor woman in France 
who could have put on paper three sentences the 
like of which we read in Madame Bovary or A 
Sentimental Education, except the author, con- 
vinced as he might be that his work never betrayed 
him. On the contrary, he was everywhere in it; so 
different from the processes and formulas of sci- 
ence are the innermost laws of literature. 

On the other hand, religion as Newman consid- 
ered it in his own person and dealing with others, 
was not a science, though systems of ethics and 
theology might take their rise from it, as in fact 
they have done. His attitude, which never 
wavered, is depicted in the well-known words of 
Pascal, who had himself taken up the same posi- 
tion. “I shall not attempt here to prove by 
natural reason the existence of God, or the Trin- 
ity, or the immortality of the soul, or anything of 
that description; not only because I should not feel 
myself strong enough to find in nature what 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 195 


would convince hardened atheists, but because 
such knowledge, apart from Jesus Christ, is use- 
less and barren. Were a man persuaded that the 
proportions of numbers are truths immaterial and 
eternal, depending on the First Truth in whom 
they subsist and whom we call God, I should not 
look upon him as much advanced on the path of 
salvation.”” And Newman said—“ I would rather 
be bound to defend the reasonableness of assuming 
that Christianity is true, than to demonstrate a 
moral government from the physical world. Life 
is for action. . . . Knowledge of premisses, 
and inferences upon them—this is not to live. 
. . . But if we commence with scientific knowl- 
edge and argumentative proof, or lay any great 
stress upon it as the basis of personal Christianity, 
or attempt to make man moral and religious by 
libraries and museums, let us in consistency take 
chemists for our cooks and mineralogists for our 
masons.” 

Faith was, then, to him the principle of action, 
not knowledge or argument. The Christian teach- 
.ing was ‘“‘a history supernatural, and almost 
scenic.” It could not be enough to defend it, or 
reasonable, either, to assail it, by appealing to the 
logical accuracy of a syllogism, when everything 
turned on the real meaning of the terms employed, 
which were only to be understood by the religious 


196 NEWMAN 


mind. And, after all, Divine Truth and human 
language were incommensurable. Moral charac- 
ter, as exhibited in thought and conduct, was like 
the solid figure of a man, which could never act- 
ually be given on a painted tablet. How, then, 
did religion spread from its living source in the 
teacher to multitudes? The answer was, by per- 
sonal influence, which offered a pattern of it and 
took hold of others as a charm. If it be the 
highest of gifts to possess an intuitive knowledge 
of the beautiful in art or the effective in action, 
there might be those who had a corresponding 
insight into moral truth, and who had reached 
that especial perfection in the spiritual part of 
their nature, which is so rarely found and so 
greatly prized among its intellectual endowments. 
Error could afford to be anonymous; Truth was 
handed on from witness to witness who sealed it 
with their life, nay, with their death,—who were 
its martyrs. 

In these deep convictions, finding their way to 
the light by means of a language as sincere and 
yet subtle as they were far-reaching, we must look. 
for the ‘‘ miracle of intellectual delicacy’ which 
Arnold perceives in Newman, and which he seems 
- to parallel with Shakespeare’s ‘‘ balance of mind.” 
A message had been entrusted to him, by its very 
nature a secret, to be delivered in terms and un- 


Photo by Draycott Cardinal Newman, about 1889. 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 197 


der conditions framed to express not only things 
different, but often things contrary to it; there was 
needed an art of composition, or of translation, 
which could never be satisfied by the first words 
at hand, nor could hope to fulfil its task unless 
the resources of language were mastered in obe- 
dience to ideas themselves, hints rather than 
images of what they represented. Moreover, the 
age of symbols had passed away; we were left 
with words, and those not pictures, as in the 
Hebrew Bible, but abstract, signs of signs, and, if 
sacred, yet so familiar that they had often ceased 
to convey any meaning. 

Again, Newman felt that ‘‘ the natural man has 
no heart for the promises of the Gospel, and dis- 
sects its evidence without reverence, without hope, 
without suspense, without misgivings.” Every 
part of such truth is novel to an opponent; seen 
detached from the whole, it becomes an objection. 
One who has not faith enough to be patient of 
doubt may have just talent enough to consider 
perspicuity the chief talent of a writer; whereas 
it is even a merit in the truly great poet, and he 
deals but with human experiences, not to be more 
obscure than we find him. Read, for instance, the 
Agamemnon of AEschylus: do you expect his 
choral odes to be plain sailing, or expostulate with 
him because you cannot in the first glance interpret 


198 NEWMAN 


his deep gnomic sayings as you wéuld a smart 
epigram of Voltaire’s? Is King t.ear easy to fol- 
low, or Troilus and Cressida, or the masterpiece 
of introspection, Hamlet? But when we leave 
court and camp for the temple, when religion is 
our theme and Scripture its representative, who 
will say that Prophets or Psalmists are popular 
compositions, level at first reading with the under- 
standings of the multitude? 

Popularity was the last thing Newman would 
have aimed at; nor can he be said to have 
touched the many, whom he did not directly 
address. During his Anglican period the Church 
of England ran more than one chance of falling 
before the onslaught, combined from various quar- 
ters and led by undaunted captains, of a philoso- 
phy which Bentham inspired, while the Liberal 
politicians of the day furnished it with weapons. 
The popular tone outside Oxford, and finally 
within it, was aggressively opposed to ideas of 
mystery, tradition, dogma, and the whole view 
which Newman draws out in his Sermons before 
the University.. In a Mechanical Age, when 
Brougham was laying it down at Glasgow as a 
great truth, ‘‘that man shall no more render 
account to man for his belief, over which he has 
himself no control,” how unpromising was the 
outlook for one who held that beliefs are de- 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 199 


pendent on the affections and stream in upon us 
through our moral nature? 

“Considered as a whole,” writes Carlyle in 
1831, ‘‘ the Christian religion of late ages has been 
continually dissipating itself into metaphysics; and 
threatens now to disappear, as some rivers do, in 
deserts of barren sands.” This, to the sad-browed 
thinker, was among those “‘ signs of the times” at 
hearing of which Macaulay laughed out loud. 
There were Discourses on the Evidences as utterly 
external and calculated for a British jury-box as 
Paley’s, which had been their pattern,—surpassing 
them, at all events, in style. Deliberate reckoning 
of interest was the method now put forward to 
explain man’s duty; and those who did not like it 
in the abstract were applying it vigorously to all 
the phenomena of the social order. Newman, 
though he came in touch with a world of English 
youth at Oxford, could no more win the country 
to his side or get a hearing from its rulers, than 
the Scotch seer who was eating his heart down in 
the wilds of Galloway. 

Nor had he, despite amazing industry, the gift 
which lesser spirits often possess—in Heine’s 
mocking phrase, the “talent to make his genius 
avail.” He began the Tracts with admirable dis- 
cernment; his contributions were, at first, short, 
sharp, and decisive; but he did not follow up the 


200 NEWMAN 


game. He turned aside to learning and libraries; 
plunged into abstruse questions—the orthodoxy 
of the Ante-Nicene Fathers; the distinction be- 
tween Antioch and Alexandria; how miracles of 
the Middle Ages were related, or otherwise, to 
the miracles of Scripture; wherein Luther differed 
from St. Augustine on the article of justification; 
and other problems, which, in general, belonged 
rather to the seventeenth than the nineteenth 
century. The prophet was turned scholar, and in 
no fashionable department. His explorations took 
him away from the track of Sanscrit philologies, 
Icelandic runes, the origin of Teutons; nor, 
though an examiner in Greek, did he give his days 
and nights to Wolf or Brunck or Bentley. A 
churchman before all things, his pages carry us 
off, provided we do not let them fall from sheer 
indifference, to Bull and Petavius, Mosheim, 
Bricker, and a company (it must be admitted) 
of pedants whose learning Gibbon has absorbed, 
by miracle not losing his original brightness. 

Nor was that all. Even in the sermons at St. 
Mary’s, but much more in writings destined for a 
wider circle, Newman’s inbred reserve compelled 
him to guard his personality with a manner as 
little familiar as he could make it. Shy men are 
formalists, and so was he. The clerical style is 
heightened in his first essays by a gravity of de- 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 201 


meanour, and a severity of speech, that have left 
on critics like Dr. Abbott an impression far from 
favourable to him, as though he were wrapped in 
predestinarian gloom. He was utterly in earnest, 
masterful by temperament, severe on himself, not 
inclined to hope, and, in any case, melancholy as 
youth will be until it finds a definite vocation. He 
never strikes the note of joy in these early dis- 
courses. He shudders at the sight of his own fail- 
ings; and the world is so completely out of joint 
that, were it not for conscience speaking within, he 
would be an atheist or pantheist. 

Thus matter and form conspired to hold aloof 
from his pages a generation which thought itself 
progressive, enlightened, and prosperous beyond 
all that had ever been. He came as a ghost to 
trouble their festivity; no smiling orator, not an 
Evangelical who, if he began with terrors, would 
end with a comfortable assurance, but, had his 
manner been less gentle, a fanatic charged to 
scourge their pleasant virtues. And scarcely had 
he opened those prophetic lips than he shocked 
High Church and Low Church by a resolute turn- 
ing towards the only Christians he could discover 
in primitive ages—the unbending Athanasius; 
Antony the father of Monasticism in Egypt; 
Basil who was its lawgiver in the East; Ambrose, 
Martin, Augustine, to whose example or encour- 


202 NEWMAN 


agement it owed its triumphs in Italy, Gaul, and 
Africa. This might be a ‘‘ second Reformation,” 
but it was reforming backwards; the nation, then 
or since, would have none of it, however individ- 
uals suffered themselves to be drawn by these new- 
old ideals. The Tractarian Movement has trans- 
formed the English Church, but not the English 
people. 

Had it done this, no doubt Newman’s writings 
would be in every one’s hands, though read by 
the serious only. But the efforts of years ended 
either in creating a High Church party on fresh 
lines, or in making converts to Rome. Its litera- 
ture, if we except the 4 pologia, has not yet forced 
the multitude to own it, as they do, reluctantly or 
gladly, Wordsworth’s chief poems and some of 
Carlyle’s prose. A popular classic is, indeed, very 
nearly a contradiction in terms. But Tennyson is 
a classic and is popular; by this we may reckon 
how far Newman ever was from satisfying the 
conditions that bring a writer of genius into 
the market-place. He must be judged by other 
standards. He is essentially for the few, an 
esoteric author whom the initiated follow with 
enthusiasm, while to strangers he seems cold and 
distant. 

_ Neither did he reveal himself, or discern where 
his real strength lay, in those first books of his. 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY = 203 


The Arians of the Fourth Century might appear 
to Dean Burgon, or other survivals from an extinct 
order, Newman’s lasting monument, only because 
it reminded them, as George III said on occasion, 
that “‘ there were giants in those days ’’—the days 
when Anglican divinity flourished. But we shall 
be disappointed if we look for his true character, 
his penetration, or sympathy, or meditative wis- 
dom, in a work overshadowed by influences which, 
as yet, he had not mastered. We are listening to 
Clement of Alexandria, not to Newman who, on 
any estimate, was incomparably more original 
than that amiable collector of anthologies. 

And if the matter is borrowed, the manner is 
mostly assumed. Doctrines tinged with mystic 
purple are rendered in floating and uncertain out- 
_ lines; the book is not a history nor even a whole; 
it draws no figure which stays with us, not Atha- 
nasius, or Constantine, or the Arian leaders, or 
Theodosius the Emperor; not Gregory of Nazian- 
zus himself, although studies for his portrait 
abound in the Saint’s own writings. Its merit con- 
sists in a bold attack on the belief, long prevalent, 
that Arius derived his views and principles from 
the Platonizing schools of Egypt; whereas New- 
man contends that the birthplace of Arianism was 
Antioch, its method the syllogism, and its guide 
Aristotle. But he had much to learn from Gibbon 


204 NEWMAN 


in the art of summing up a situation and endowing 
its personages with a touch of life. 

The works which followed, if not invariably so 
abstruse, had no direct bearing on history. They 
were polemical, such as The Prophetic Office of 
the Church of England; and the Eighty-fifth 
Tract on difficulties in the Bible compared with 
difficulties in the Creed; or doctrinal, as the Lect- 
ures on Justification. Of these works it must be 
said that, notwithstanding beautiful and suggestive 
passages, they are done with. No theologians, 
Catholic or Lutheran, have gone to the essay on 
Justification for ideas; it was probably as little re- 
garded by Julius Miller in his epoch-making 
treatise, as by the Jesuit masters in Rome. Yet, 
considered from the spiritual point of view, it is 
deep and affecting, not to say exquisitely written. 
The Tract on Church and Bible was inspired by 
the Analogy, and contains a defence of its 
method, which has been taxed with scepticism, as a 
‘* kill or cure ’’ system landing the reason in highly 
dangerous dilemmas. 

We are here on modern ground, a fact which 
. did not escape the sharp eyes of Professor Hux- 
ley. Newman, as he tells us himself, had gathered 
from Blanco White that there was a way of re- 
garding the Bible less narrow than the Evangelical 
in which he had been brought up. And though 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 205 


he did not apparently fall in with such liberal 
practices, yet as an argumentum ad hominem he 
was willing to bear them in mind. Heretical 
teachers, with Jews of the Sadducean type, with 
Theodore of Mopsuestia, who became the chief 
Doctor of Nestorian Churches, with Latitudina- 
rians like Hales or Selden, might be sticklers for 
the literal sense. But Catholic writers had taken 
another path. Newman says of the true Church, 
“her most subtle and powerful method of proof, 
whether in ancient or modern times, is the mystical 
sense, which is so frequently used in doctrinal con- 
troversy as on many occasions to supersede any 
other.” Nay, he concludes, “‘ it may be almost laid 
down as an historical fact, that the mystical in- 
terpretation and orthodoxy will stand or fall to- 
gether.” 

That which emboldened Newman to attack 
with the sword of dilemma, was his firm belief of 
there being two powers, and two only, in conflict, 
Catholic Truth and Rationalism. ‘‘ Then will be 
the stern encounter,”’ he said, ‘‘ when two real and 
living principles, one in the Church, the other out 
of it, at length rush upon each other, contending 
not for names and words, or half-views, but for 
elementary notions and distinctive moral char- 
acters.” He scoffed at the “ sensible, temperate, 
sober, well-judging persons” who were preferred 


206 NEWMAN 


in high places to guide religion “through the 
channel of No-meaning, between the Scylla and 
Charybdis of Aye and No.” Whether the ideas 
of the coming age were true or false, they would 
be real. And to make his hearers realize what 
they held, of course in the hope that it would be 
Christian, the preacher did not hesitate to enforce 
a parallel between the obscurities of the Bible and 
the objections to the Church. 

Professor Huxley states the position with his 
usual terseness; “ the dogma of the infallibility of 
the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of 
the infallibility of the Pope. If the former is held 
by ‘ faith,’ then the latter may be. If the latter 
is to be accepted, or rejected, by private judg- 
ment, why not the former?”’ Moreover, since 
all the Protestant creeds were professedly based on 
the canonical Scriptures, “‘ it followed that, in the 
long run, whoso settled the canon defined the 
creed.” We had now the issue, on which hung 
such momentous consequences, set before us in its 
real magnitude. ‘‘ The logical acumen of Augus- 
tine,”’ says Huxley once more, ‘‘ showed him that 
the authority of the Gospel he preached must rest 
on that of the Church to which he belonged.” 

It would be unfair not to give the eminent 
agnostic’s conclusion; “if with one hand Dr. 
Newman has destroyed Protestantism, he has an- 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 207 


nihilated Romanism with the other; and the total 
result of his ambidextral efforts is to shake Chris- 
tianity to its foundations. Nor was any one 
better aware that this must be the inevitable result 
of his arguments—if the world should refuse to 
accept Roman doctrines and Roman miracles— 
than the writer of Tract Eighty-five.” ‘‘ He be- 
lieved,” the Professor goes on to say, “that his 
arguments led either Romeward, or to what eccle- 
siastics call ‘ Infidelity,’ and I call ‘ Agnosticism.’ 
I believe that he was quite right in this conviction; 
but while he chooses the one alternative, I choose 
the other.” 

From this it would appear as if Tract Eighty- 
five still had its bearing on the great world-prob- 
lems; and so it has for all who will turn to it. 
Nevertheless, Bible criticism in England now occu- 
pies such a space, and the points on which Newman 
dwelt have been merged into inquiries so much 
larger and more radical, that his treatment can- 
not fail to seem old-fashioned. Yet there are in it 
pregnant observations not a few, like the follow- 
ing: “‘ though the Bible be inspired, it has all such 
characteristics as might attach to a book unin- 
spired—the characteristics of dialect and style, the 
distinct effects of times and places, youth and age, 
_of moral and intellectual character.” And there 
is an admirable page, too long for quotation, but 


208 NEWMAN 


which would arrest us in the most accomplished 
critic, on the simplicity, depth, and consequent in- 
completeness of the Scripture record. It is no 
flattery, but a truth which will strike any one who 
reads it, that this description of the spirit in which 
the sacred writers come before us, applies accu- 
rately to Newman’s own manner. His “ half- 
sentences, parentheses, clauses, nay his words, 
have a meaning in them independent of the con- 
text, and admit of exposition. There is nothing 
put in for ornament’s sake, or for rhetoric; noth- 
' ing put in for the mere sake of anything else, but 
all for its own sake; all as the expressions and 
shadows of great things, as seeds of thought, and 
with corresponding realities.” 

Another remarkable attempt to apply the prin- 
ciple of Butler’s philosophy, was exhibited in the 
second Essay on Miracles. Whatever may be the 
judgment of a reader in our time who gives him- 
self to these refined and fascinating suggestions, 
on a subject which has divided churches and agi- 
tated nations, he will hardly take his ground where 
Macaulay did in 1843. Writing to Napier of the 
Edinburgh, the great rhetorician tells him, ‘‘ New- 
man announces an English Hagiology in numbers, 
which is to contain the lives of such blessed saints 
as Thomas a Becket and Dunstan. I should not 
dislike to be the avvocato del diavolo on such an 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 209 


occasion.” And again, “I hear much of the 
miracles of the third and fourth centuries by 
Newman. I think that I could treat that subject 
without giving scandal to any rational person, and 
I should like it much. The times require a Mid- 
dleton.” 

Perhaps it may be well to observe that Con- 
yers Middleton, here invoked against Newman, 
was in Sir Leslie Stephen’s judgment, as in De 
Quincey’s, a confirmed opponent of the super- 
natural, and if a Christian, which may be doubted, 
he was one on grounds of social expediency, 
rather than of spiritual faith, Newman himself 
grants in the dpologia that science can probably 
explain, as taking place in the order of nature, 
various facts which hitherto have been considered 
by Catholics as simply miraculous. But he adds, 
“There is this gain accruing from the larger 
views we now possess of the operation of natural 
causes; our opponents will not in future be so 
ready to impute fraud and falsehood to our priests 
and their witnesses, on the ground of their pre- 
tending or reporting things that are incredible.” 
He hopes that “‘ our facts will be investigated, not 
our testimony impugned.” 

How Macaulay would have written we know, 
for we know how Middleton has written. And 
how much more sensitive to testimony, as well as 


210 NEWMAN 


more modest in negation, a later age can be, we 
may learn from recent estimates of St. Dunstan, 
one of the glories of Saxon England, and from 
so candid an inquiry as Dr. Abbott’s, concerning 
the Death and Miracles of St. Thomas of Canter- 
bury. This keen and to some extent sceptical au- 
thor writes, ‘‘I should be disposed to think that 
almost all the early miracles were facts, corre- 
sponding largely to the description of them.” He 
calls this ‘‘one of the many triumphs of mind 
over matter.” And he explains it thus: “ Through 
ballads, sermons, pictures, and above all, through 
stories of pilgrims passing to and from the Mar- 
tyr’s Memorial, there was gradually conveyed 
to the minds of almost all the sick and suffering 
folk in England, and to their sympathizing house- 
holds and friends, the image of St. Thomas before 
the altar, clothed in white, with the streak of blood 
across his face. This vision, or this thought, re- 
sulted in a multitude of mighty works of healing.” 

With that account of St. Thomas of Canterbury 
and his miracles after death, it is impossible not 
to compare what Newman has argued in a matter 
of infinitely greater consequence, which it will also 
serve to illustrate. What is the explanation, he 
asks, of the wonderful triumph achieved by 
Christianity, although Christ Himself had de- 
parted? He answers that, through His preachers, 


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‘WIEYAUIULIIG Ie9U ‘[EUpay Je PARI S,UBUIMaN] [BEUIpseD simaT “I, &q oj0yg 


Lapa rerhacck 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 211 


the Image of Christ was found imprinted in the 
minds of His subjects individually; that image, 
apprehended and worshipped, became a real bond 
of those subjects one with another; it was their 
moral life, as it was the original instrument of 
their conversion. It was “ the Image of Him who 
fulfils the one great need of human nature, the 
healer of its wounds, the physician of the soul; this 
image it is which both creates faith and then re- 
wards it.” 

To such effect Newman in the Grammar of 
Assent. If that mental vision be called “ cloudy, 
fanciful, unintelligible,’ he answers that it cannot 
appear otherwise to the ‘‘ disputer of this world,” 
since it is really miraculous. A new idea, which 
produced changes so astounding, moral, religious, 
political, in the minds and conduct of myriads, is 
certainly not to be explained away by fraud or 
cunning; and if we utter the word ‘“‘ enthusiasm ” 
we are at once taken back to the inward impulse 
from which it was derived; we have passed be- 
yond the region of calculable or mechanical forces. 
The argument a priori which denies whatsoever 
‘breaks the monotony of palpable cause and pal- 
pable effect,” itself breaks down when brought 
face to face with conditions so peculiar, yet so well- 
ascertained, as these. Instead of its being im- 
probable that signs and wonders should occur, it 


212 NEWMAN 


is highly improbable that they should not. The 
process may be obscure, the psychology too deli- 
cate for our instruments; but the facts alleged, now 
that they fall under a rule and motive, cease to be 
unreasonable, isolated, and incredible. 

““ Tf the miracles of Church history,” said New- 
man in the treatise that Macaulay disparaged, 
“cannot be defended by the arguments of Leslie, 
Lyttleton, Paley, or Douglas’’—famous apolo- 
gists of the eighteenth century—‘‘ how many of 
the Scripture miracles satisfy their conditions? ” 
These writers had been willing or desirous to es- 
tablish the truth of Christianity on miracles such 
as could be proved in a court of justice by legal 
evidence. Instead of prophets announcing the 
year of redemption, lawyers were to come for- 
ward, with briefs in their hands, skilful at cross- 
examining witnesses. 

But why should such evidence be indispensable 
as a test of truth? Middleton had refrained from 
attacking the Scripture miracles because, as he 
said, they were found in an inspired narrative. 
Suppose the narrative not inspired, would those 
particular facts never have taken place? Could 
the artist or poet, summoned before a jury, prove 
to them by what experiences he had reached his 
creative designs, or show them more than the effect 
of a hidden and now unattainable cause? Must 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 213 


Revelation either not be given, or come with an 
array of proofs clear enough to vanquish the 
obstinacy, while in no degree changing the hearts, 
of unbelievers? Or could we impose conditions 
on the Supreme? Nay, rather, Newman replies, 
“if we only go so far as to realize what Chris- 
tianity is, when considered merely as a creed, and 
what stupendous overpowering facts are involved 
in the doctrine of a Divine Incarnation, we shall 
feel that no miracle can be great after it, nothing 
strange or marvellous, nothing beyond expecta- 
tion.” 

To his mind this was the antecedent probability 
on which alleged miraculous occurrences should 
be judged; and as for the evidence, it might be 
strong or slight, abundant or scarcely any at all, 
but it was not invalidated because it failed, if so 
be, to reach the high-water mark of proofs ten- 
dered to a jury. ‘Our view of the evidence,” 
he did not shrink from asserting, “‘ will practically 
be decided by our views of theology. . . . Men 
will systematize facts in their own way, according 
to their knowledge, opinions, and wishes; and 
they will refer them to causes which they see or 
believe, in spite of their being referable to other 
causes about which they are ignorant or sceptical. 

As the admission of a Creator is necessary 
for the argumentative force of the miracles of 


214 NEWMAN 


Moses or St. Paul, so does the doctrine of a Divine 
Presence in the Church supply what is ambiguous 
in the miracles of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus or 
St. Martin.”? And, ‘‘ as in the natural world the 
animal and vegetable kingdoms imperceptibly melt 
into each other, so are there mutual affinities 
and correspondences between the two families of 
miracles as found in inspired and uninspired his- 
tory, which show that, whatever may be their 
separate peculiarities, yet as far as concerns their 
internal characteristics, they admit of being parts 
of one system.” 

It cannot fail to strike the reader that Newman 
is here engaged upon an argument from con- 
tinuity, very like the thought afterwards to be 
exhibited by Darwin with such a wealth of detail; 
and it is manifestly akin to the notion of develop- 
ment, or rather passes into it so soon as particu- 
lars come to be handled. Things which are like 
one another we readily take to be akin; descent 
will account for their likeness; but a closer scrutiny 
reveals that they are also unlike, and how shall we 
meet this more complex problem? Does kinship 
bring with it an unvarying repetition of one pat- 
tern? Are real types reducible to formulas which 
exhaust their possibilities? And can these or 
similar questions be decided a priori, any more 
than the law of gravitation and other laws in the 


HIS: PLACE! IN| HISTORY © 21% 


physical universe? Could we come to Church and 
Bible with rules ready-made, Procrustean require- 
ments, corresponding indeed to our notions of the 
fitness of things, but rightly waived aside by the 
deep thinker who reminds us that we have no 
means of judging how a Revelation shall be made, 
if given at all? 

When Newman had reached this point in his 
meditations, he was on the eve of momentous 
discoveries. ‘The method familiar to polemics on 
all sides, by which the present was simply identi- 
fied with the past and both shut up in an abstract 
equation, must give place to one more impersonal. 
“ Christianity has been long enough in the world” 
—it is thus that the Development opens—‘ to 
justify us in dealing with it as a fact in the world’s 
history. Its genius and character, its doctrines, 
precepts, and objects cannot be treated as matters 
of private opinion or deduction, unless we may 
reasonably so regard the Spartan institutions or 
the religion of Mahomet.” This was the historic 
method. Not as if the author had forgotten his 
own declarations touching the ‘‘ antecedent prob- 
abilities,” or idiosyncracies of the individual, on 
which he enlarges elsewhere. He knows that men 
will differ when all is said; but history brings mat- 
ters to a test and submits them to a tribunal where 
the issue may be clearly stated, or even decided, 


216 NEWMAN 


unlike the method of arguing from formulas which 
is pure deduction. 

Church history, as we saw, had become a dead 
letter in the English Universities; it found no stu- 
dents, as it could hope for scarcely any readers, 
among the public out of doors. The Bible, han- 
dled piecemeal, by texts and chapters, was the sole 
source of Revelation; personal caprice took from 
its teaching what it would and left the remainder. 
But the most surprising consequence was that a 
religion which had subdued the Roman Empire, 
converted the Teutons, Slavs, Celts, Norsemen, 
absorbed the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, 
preserved ancient literature and created modern, 
seemed, if anything was to be concluded from the 
silence of divines and the neglect of learned men, 
to have had no history at all. What could be the 
scope or depth of a philosophy which, allowing 
the Apostolic age to be a continuation of the Gos- 
pel, broke off abruptly when St. John died, leaped 
over twelve or fifteen centuries, and would fain 
perceive in a small sect creeping through the dark 
here and there that Universal Church which was 
magnified by prophets and destined to teach all 
nations ? 

Now that we are steeped in the ideas which 
make evolution our mental form (tending itself to 
lose contents and sink into a formula) we cannot 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 217 


but see on every page of the Development Dar- 
win’s advancing shadow. As he was to con- 
template biology—the story of life realizing its 
potencies in every direction, yet moving up into 
species more perfect than its starting-point towards 
adaptation in a world where it must make its 
home, so Newman tracked religion from its re- 
corded origins in Scripture along the periods by 
which it came down, uninterruptedly, to his own 
day. Darwin set up the law of Natural Selection 
as explaining how varieties, when once given, 
brought forth species: Newman, without employ- 
ing the term, indicates Supernatural Selection as 
the principle by which truth is winnowed from 
heresy, and institutions are developed to meet the 
changing circumstances of mankind. “I saw,” 
he remarks in the Apologia, that “ the principle 
of development not only accounted for certain 
facts, but was in itself a remarkable philosophical 
phenomenon, giving a character to the whole 
course of Christian thought. It was discernible 
from the first years of Christian teaching up to the 
present day, and gave to that teaching a unity and 
individuality. It served as a sort of test, which 
the Anglican could not stand, that modern Rome 
was in truth ancient Antioch, Alexandria, and 
Constantinople, just as a mathematical curve has 
its own law and expression.” 


218 NEWMAN 


But there is a closer resemblance to the Origin 
of Species than this discovery of one law, or one 
element, running through all fruitful variation, in 
Newman’s treatise. What did the latter under- 
stand by ‘‘ development”? Was it, as the school- 
men used to distinguish, preformation or epigene- 
sis? These technical terms have distinct meanings. 
In the idea of preformation, “all the future 
products, down to the very last, lie secretly 
wrapped up in the original germ,” and are simply 
unfolded as time goes on. ‘That is, evidently, a 
mechanical notion which would take from living 
things their mystery as their power. But in epi- 
genesis ‘‘ every stage of the growth becomes a 
causative impulse to a new stage,” and the ele- 
ments supervene as fresh matter, to be assimilated 
under law in a synthesis not hitherto realized. 
‘“* Development,” Newman says roundly, “is a 
process of incorporation.” For “ doctrines and 
views which relate to man are not placed in a void, 
but in the crowded world, and make way for them- 
selves by interpenetration, and develop by absorp- 
tion. Facts and opinions which have hitherto been 
regarded in other relations and grouped round oth- 
er centres, henceforth are gradually attracted to a 
new influence and subjected to a new sovereign. 
They are modified, laid down afresh, thrust aside, 
as the case may be. A new element of order and 


HIS. PLACE IN HISTORY 219 


composition has come among them.” Clearly, 
this “‘ eclectic, conservative, assimilating, healing, 
moulding process”’ is not mere explication, but 


epigenesis. 
And, in religious ideas as in forms of life, there 
is a struggle for existence. “‘In Christianity, 


opinion, while a raw material, is called philosophy 
or scholasticism; when a rejected refuse, it is 
called heresy.”’ It kept its original type, from its 
perception and love of what had been revealed 
once for all and was no private imagination. It 
had always the dogmatic principle by which to 
accept or reject what was offered. ‘‘ As the first 
step in settling a question is to raise and debate 
it, so heresies in every age may be taken as the 
measure of the existing state of thought in the 
Church, and of the movement of her theology; 
they determine in what way the current is set- 
ting, and the rate at which it flows.” It is ‘no 
random combination of various opinions, but a 
diligent, patient working out of one doctrine from 
many materials. The conduct of Popes, Coun- 
cils, Fathers, betokens the slow, painful, anxious 
taking up of new elements into an existing body 
of belief.” There is even a ‘‘ sacramental prin- 
ciple,” a certain virtue or grace, which “ changes 
the quality of doctrines, opinions, usages, actions, 
and personal characters when incorporated with 


220 NEWMAN 


it, and makes them right and acceptable, whereas 
before they were either infected with evil, or at 
best but shadows of truth.” The force of epi- 
genesis can no farther go; it amounts to trans- 
formation, yet not of the divine germ, but of that 
which it subdues to itself. Hence it is that “ the 
rulers of the Church from early times were pre- 
pared, should the occasion arise, to adopt, or imi- 
tate, or sanction, the existing rites and customs of 
the populace, as well as the philosophy of the edu- 
cated class.”’ 

In saying all this, not only was Newman, like 
Isaiah, very bold, but he was putting forward a 
philosophy of Christian action which could not be 
limited to past ages. When he joined the Roman 
Church he found in its schools and its accredited 
manuals of teaching a different method at work, 
which is best exemplified in Bossuet’s famous 
Variations. To the changes among Protestants 
Bossuet opposed the uniformity of Catholic dogma 
and practice. His arguments were forcible; his 
tone was commanding; and, since by temper he 
was not critical, the complexities of Church his- 
tory failed to leave traces on his imagination. 
Moreover, the scholastic method is deductive, it 
starts from a synthesis already gained, without 
inquiring, unless by compulsion, into its previous 
stages. Newman stood outside the school, as it 


& 1 CO AN 
SE OA OR BE es i 


Photo by H. N. King 


The Statue of Cardinal Newman 
at the Brompton Oratory, London. 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 221 


were in the public street, and had to win the 
passers-by on terms which, while faithful to the 
creed, were intelligible to them. It might be ex- 
pected, therefore, that as the critical or historical 
demands of the century grew louder, his way of 
meeting them would be more in request. 

This expectation was fulfilled and is in course 
of larger acceptance wherever the Catholic doc- 
trine has come into close quarters with Bible 
studies, the problems of science, physical and 
metaphysical, and the elements of a new civilisa- 
tion. On all these great and difficult subjects, the 
Development will be consulted for its “ hints and 
seeds of thought” during many years to come; it 
has an importance for the future surpassing all 
its reviews of primitive Christianity. Until its 
work is done, it cannot die. 

In like manner we may look upon the Gram- 
mar of Assent as delivering the individual from 
the yoke of a pedantic and unreal system, which 
made our apprehension of truth dependent on 
rules, not otherwise than the authority of the 
Christian Church was supposed to depend on 
formal evidence tested by private judgment. Cer- 
titude in religion or in any other department of 
action is not thus to be “cribbed, cabined, and 
confined,” according to the cast-iron logic which 
would take from poetry, from love, from inspira- 


222 NEWMAN 


tion their dearest elements as not being susceptible 
of proof. We cannot dispense with personality 
in concrete and vital issues; if we affect to do so, 
it is either a pretence or a mistake. Reason, 
taste, skill, invention in the Fine Arts—and so, 
again, discretion or judgment in conduct—“ are 
exerted spontaneously, when once acquired, and 
could not give a clear account of themselves, or 
of their mode of proceeding. They do not go 
by rule.” Genius has its own subject-matter. 
“We are bound,” says Aristotle, who is on this 
great question the master of Newman, “ to give 
heed to the undemonstrated sayings and opinions 
of the experienced and aged, not less than to 
demonstrations; because, from their having the 
eye of experience, they behold the principles of 
things.” 

This, which may be called English, nay Shake- 
spearean, wisdom was the grand attribute of New- 
man himself. If he wrote of development in 
Christian doctrine, it was because he had lived 
through the process, spending years in an effort of 
mind and heart to pass along with the Church 
from her beginnings to her latest period. "When 
he saw in real assents the true motive-powers that 
lead to action, he was appealing to his own story, 
which had been always governed by them, as he 
knew well, and not by arguments on paper, loud 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY = 293 


rhetoric, or the idols of the market place and the 
theatre. Did he put forward a view of University 
education which inculcated a liberal training rather 
than aimed at creating experts and specialists who 
should know not a syllable outside their art, he 
was its manifest example no less than its convinced 
advocate. If he held up the ancient classics for 
imitation, he showed how it could be done without 
sacrifice of originality, as he threw himself into the 
Catholic tradition yet kept every one of his most 
characteristic features. In statement he may not 
be always uniform; he cannot be tabulated, 
summed up, resolved into parts, and set out in 
proportions; for he is ever himself, as individual 
as Goethe, yet not like Goethe isolated, or stand- 
ing apart from the beneficent institutions, by 
which the race is preserved from _ barbarism, 
religious, political, and mental. 

Newman’s supreme gift was an intellect which 
detected the logical inadequacy of words, argu- 
ments, ideas, and systems when confronted with 
the realities which they bodied forth. On the 
other hand, he perceived that the individual must 
be guided by his conscience, and that society lives 
by revelation and tradition. Hence are derived 
his four great leading principles—implicit reason, 
economical representation, symbolic expression, 
and the necessary development of creeds. Thus 


224 NEWMAN 


he bridges the gulf between reason and experi- 
ence; he connects the finite with the Infinite; he 
deduces the Catholic Church from Primitive 
Christianity; and he protects faith against the 
assaults of a fictitious enlightenment. Religion 
and science are brought to the same touchstone, 
which is reality known or desired, sought by love 
and possessed by life, of which the guiding motive 
must be a moral choice in action. 'Whoso accepts 
this doctrine has escaped from the eighteenth 
century and overthrown Rationalism. 

His other works, besides those which we have 
named, are chapters in self-portraiture, leading up 
to the Apologia or illustrating it. Letters, stories, 
sermons, belong to the full description of a man 
whose language, always sincere, was wrought up 
little by little to a finish and a refinement, a 
strength and a subtlety, thrown into the forms of 
eloquence, beyond which no English writer of 
prose has gone. It had its limits, at least in the 
using. But there seems to be no subject and no 
character to which it would not be equal. It is 
invariably just, tender, penetrating, animated, de- 
cisive, and weighty. It is eminently pure. It has 
learned to smile; it can be entertaining, humorous, 
pleading, indignant, as its creator wills. It lends 
grace and persuasive charm to the most recondite 
of arguments. It is at once English of the centre 


HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 225 


and Newman’s own style, inimitable because it is 
natural. By it he will live when the questions 
upon which it was employed have sunk below the 
horizon, or appear above it in undreamt-of shapes; 
for it is in itself a thing of light and beauty, a 
treasure from the classic past, an inheritance be- 
queathed to those peoples and continents which 
shall bear onward to far-off ages the language and 
literature that entitle England to a place beside 
Rome and Hellas in the world’s chronicle. 


THE END 


LITERARY LIVES 
Edited by W. ROBERTSON NICOLL 


Matthew Arnold 


By G. W. E. RUSSELL 


Extract from Preface: 


<©WT was Arnold’s express wish that he should not be made 

the subject of a Biography. This rendered it impossible 

to produce the sort of book by which an eminent man is 
usually commemorated—at once a history of his life, an estimate 
of his work, and an analysis -f his character and opinions. But, 
though a biography wa. forbidden, Arnold’s family felt sure he 
would not have objected to the publication of a selection from 
his correspondence ; and it !ecame my happy task to collect, 
and in some sense to edit, the two volumes of his letters which 
were published in 1895. The letters, with all their editorial 
shortcomings (of which I willingly take my full share), constitute 
_ the nearest approach to a narrative of Arnold’s life which can, 
consistently with his wishes, be given to the world; and the 
ground so covered will not be retraversed here. All that literary 
criticism can do for the honor of his prose and verse has been done 
already, conscientiously by Mr. Saintsbury, affectionately and 
sympathetically by Mr. Paul, and with varying competence and 
skill by a host of minor critics. But in preparing this book I 
have been careful not to re-read what more accomplished pens 
than mine have written, for I wished my judgment to be unbiased 
by previous verdicts. 

«<T do not aim at a criticism of the verbal medium through 
which a great master uttered his heart and mind, but rather at a 
survey of the effect which he produced on the thought and 
action of his age.”’ 


With photogravure frontispiece and 16 illustrations 
$1.00 net (postage, 10 cents) 


LITERARY LIVES 


Cardinal Newman 
By WILLIAM BARRY, D.D. 


Author of «<The New Antigone,’’ ete. 


With photogravure frontispiece and 16 full-page illus- 
trations. $1.00 net (postage, 10 cents) 


CONTENTS 
I. Early Years. V. The Logic of Belief. 
II. The Tractarians. VI. Dream of Gerontius. 


III. First Catholic Period. VII. The Man of Letters. 


IV. Apologia pro Vita VIII. Newman’s Place in 
Sua. History. 


EX PRAC# 


“WN one thing Newman far surpassed Wesley : he was 

a man of letters equal to the greatest writers of prose 
his native country had brought forth. The Catholic 
Reaction of the Nineteenth Century claims its place in 
literature, thanks to this incomparable talent, side by side 
with the German mysticism of Carlyle, the devout lib- 
eralism of Tennyson, the Iyric Utopias of Shelley, and 
the robust optimism of Browning. Newman is an 
English classic.” 


I 


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— 
“4. 
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L. B. Cat. No. 1137 


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D00285961V 


